Last month’s outage at Chicago’s 911 emergency communications center has cost taxpayers $641,600, officials said Tuesday.
Meanwhile, the cause of the problem has been traced to an unexplained failure of the motherboard–the electronic brain–in the center’s electrical switching system, they reported.
Most of the city’s outlay after the July 22 shutdown, almost $500,000, went for repairs of the switching system–called an uninterruptible power supply–and for buying a second system that now serves as a backup, said Ron Huberman, executive director of the Office of Emergency Management and Communications.
The rest was for overtime paid to police officers and workers at the 911 center and the neighboring 311 center as they handled emergency calls and fire and police dispatching.
The system is supposed to detect an interruption of electricity in the main Commonwealth Edison line to the 911 center and switch automatically to backup sources of electricity.
City officials at first said the system failed after an outage of the main ComEd line.
But an internal check by the utility company found no evidence of such an outage.
Further investigation concluded that the system’s motherboard failed, and, when it did so, “it ordered the system to shut down,” Huberman said.
But the cause of the malfunction has not been pinpointed, he said.
“The reality is we are not going to know. We can see what fried within that motherboard, but what [caused that] we are not able to determine.”
———-
From news services.
