South Santa Clara County 911 down

[ZBeeb]

Overnight there was a significant cable cut to fiber lines running in the Morgan Hill/Gilroy areas that has resulted in telephone service to the southern parts of Santa Clara County being down.

This is affecting 911, landline, cellphone and internet on both Verizon and AT&T. Some calls can be made inside Morgan Hill to other locations inside Morgan Hill, but not to 911.

Fire Channels are suggesting there are multiple cuts in multiple locations on the fiber line, which has police very concerned (to put it mildly).

Santa Clara County EOC is staffed, Morgan Hill EOC is staffed, Gilroy EOC is staffed.

Fire organizations (County Fire, South County Fire (operated by CalFire) and Gilroy Fire) kept their staff at morning shift changing doubling the crews in the area, and have sent crews to Police stations, as well as providing additional staffing to keep someone at the Station if the rigs go out so people looking for help can get it at the fire stations, police stations and hospitals. Fire is also sending staff to local high spots to act as fire spotters.

People are being advised to "flag down an emergency vehicle" if they need help, additional Police and Sheriff units are on patrol, AMR has 6 additional ambulances in the area (up from the usual 3 to now 9). In addition to the extra rigs and manpower above some of the fire departments are pulling in extra staff to drive around in utility vehicles.

The outage apparently also affects parts of Santa Cruz and San Benito counties.

 

[ZBeeb]

This all started a little before 2:00am, so 911 has been down for a LOOOOOONG time now,,,

The latest update just in is that Verizon is attempting to setup a system that will redirect 911 calls to the seven digit regular phone number for the Morgan Hill and Gilroy Police Communications centers - they won't have all the usual subscriber information, caller address and so on they would normally have, but it's a big step up from what they have now... no clear idea of how long it will take them to set that up.

CalFire is bringing in three Satellite units with phone and internet capability and a Comm trailer.

 

[ZBeeb]

From the local newspaper web site...

"John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T, said it appears somebody opened a manhole in South San Jose, climbed down 8 to 10 feet and cut four or five fiber-optic cables. Britton also said there was a report of underground cables being cut in San Carlos."

"San Jose police spokesman Sgt. Ronnie Lopez said the manhole covers are heavy and would take quite an effort to lift, perhaps even requiring a tool."

"Service is expected to be restored at around 6 p.m. today."

 

[RobVallejo]

It really stings to realize how vulnerable our infrastructure is. This could be brainless vandalism or a coordinated criminal (or terrorist) effort. Time for everyone to practice their large scale natural disaster plan.

 

[dxradio2003]

For Info: Listen to mutual aid channels, such as 154.920, 155.475 and 37.08 Mhz for mutual aid coordination and latest information. These channels are active along with secondary channels from Fire and Sheriff.

 

[ZBeeb]

Santa Clara County officials have declared a local emergency following a widespread phone outage in the south county, as well as in Santa Cruz County.
Residents facing an emergency who can't reach 911 because of the outage should use a cell phone if possible to call the police dispatch numbers for help. The numbers are:

Gilroy (408) 846-0350
Morgan Hill: (408) 779-2101
Unincorporated areas: (408) 299-2311
San Jose: (408) 277-8900

Search and rescue crews have set up the following locations to respond to residents reporting locations:

Uvas and Watsonville roads, near Gilroy
McKean and Bailey roads, near South San Jose and Morgan Hill
Oak Glen and Edmonson roads, near Morgan Hill
Watsonville Road and Highway 152, near Gilroy
New and Church avenues, near San Martin
Maple and Foothill avenues, near San Martin.

 

[pasadenamd]

Thanks for all the updates. Do you know of online feed for this area?

 

[ZBeeb]

firescan.net home

The Santa Clara County Fire feed is good and the SCU feed (CDF Santa Clara unit) cover most of it. I use this bookmark:

Firescan: Index by who was paged

Which creates an entry when someone is toned and you can listen to the traffic on that channel for a few minutes from the time of the tones. It's also useful because when you ask it for the two hours of audio from this time or that time etc the audio file just has the radio traffic, the radio silence isn't included in the audio, so it is time compressed

 

[karldotcom]

Dont they have an "earthquake mode" to have public safety patrol their districts? AT&T probably fired the wrong guy.

 

[trooperdude]

Thanks for all the updates. Do you know of online feed for this area?

I was feeding this all day at IBN News

on both Teamspeak and Icecast.

 

[ZBeeb]

So this'll be my last update tonight...

As of just before 11:00pm they say most places had phone service including 911 back again... there were some much smaller pockets still affected and they expect to have service fully restored by 1:00am...

"Some 17 hours after critical fiber-optic cables were cut by someone who climbed down a manhole early Thursday morning, phone service was finally restored to Morgan Hill and Gilroy and parts of Santa Cruz and San Benito counties." Says the Mercury News.

Fire and Police did in my opinion a great job of hitting the streets and providing community coverage, it was clearly stressful for them, but they had a good handle on it and moved quickly and effectively to cover the areas.

Meanwhile up in San Jose where the damage was actually done local police and the FBI are running an investigation to find out who did it and why... the charges could ended up being anything from petty vandalism through to full scale terrorism, depending on where the case leads them. Personally I can't see vandals randomly hitting the two specific man holes a half mile apart and randomly getting the specific cables that would so effectively isolate such a large area, seems far more surgical than a vandalism attack to me... but then again, what do I know.

 

[ScannerDude244]

on white 1 I heard Monterey county dispatch taking some calls for Santa Cruz county.