I'm finding out through unofficial sources that the system was in fact down for 20 minutes.
Fire dispatch had to place phone calls to stations for calls, and were not able to communicate with them once they left the station.
Police dispatch initiated a procedure for when the system is down, which involves placing phone calls to individual units, and possibly involves some sort of staging. I'm getting conflicting answers on that part. Some units still have VHF mobile radios, and I heard at least one unit tell dispatch that he happened to have his VHF hand-held radio, and that he would "stay out".
My first question is, "Why didn't anyone think to tell units to switch to NPSPAC channels. If they did think of that, was that system down as well, or was that suggestion discarded for some other reason?"
My next question is, "Were there any delays in dispatching calls?" and "Were there any calls that were delayed until the system came back up?"
And of course, "What was the cause?" and "What's being done to prevent this in the future?"
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Oh yes, can you think of any questions that you would like an answer to? I can't think of all the questions, folks ;-)
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