Small Town News

Providers equipment failure knocks out city of Cheney phones for two days

---

While technology advances every day, sometimes we don't appreciate the simple act of picking up the phone and talking to another human being.

The city of Cheney found out just how much it needs phones to connect with the public when that capability failed.

A hardware malfunction Sunday afternoon stopped the public from reaching Cheney city departments, and vice versa, with their regular phone numbers.

Phone numbers with the "498" prefix were offline after the failure, but the city was able to establish new, temporary phone numbers for the public to access various departments.

The failed hardware belonged to S.T.A.T. Communications, which connects the city's internal voiceover IP phone system to the public phone system. Police Cmdr. Rick Campbell said S.T.A.T. technicians were unable to fix the hardware Monday and had to order and install a new part. Systems were back online Tuesday afternoon, and city IT staff members were debugging the system Tuesday.

City Administrator Arlene Fisher called an emergency meeting of department heads early Monday morning, where a plan was devised to forward incoming calls to certain staff members' cell phones.

"Not all of the phones were forwarded, but every department had a phone number where they could be reached," Fisher said.

A list of the phone numbers was sent to local businesses, media and the school district Monday morning.

"Obviously it worked because people called to report power outages," she said, noting Monday's high winds that were unrelated to the city's phone problems.

Fisher said that although some calls were likely missed, staff members did their best with an unexpected situation.

During the outage, staff members in city departments were able to reach other departments by phone using the city's internal system, and they also used e-mail to communicate, but external calls to or from city phones were not possible until Tuesday around 3 p.m.

Despite most departments heavily relying on phones to do their normal business, Campbell said city staff members were able to continue as best they could for the 40-some hours without the regular phone service.

"Overall we had a bad situation that we made work and business continued," he said.

Becky Thomas can be reached at becky@cheneyfreepress.com.



Copyright 2010 Cheney Free Press, Cheney, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from SmallTownPapers, Inc.

© 2010 Cheney Free Press Cheney, Washington. All Rights Reserved. This content, including derivations, may not be stored or distributed in any manner, disseminated, published, broadcast, rewritten or reproduced without express, written consent from DAS.

More from Cheney Free Press