RENO -- The Washoe County Sheriff’s Office Communications Center and Reno’s Emergency Communications (Reno ECOMM) advises the equipment failure that affected parts of Reno, Washoe County, Sparks, and Carson City from calling 9-1-1 has been repaired. 

During AT&T’s outage, Washoe County’s, the City of Reno’s, and the City of Sparks’ Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP) phone system remained in full operation. If the AT&T network was able to connect a 9-1-1 caller to one of the PSAPs it was answered. The three PSAPs have worked with AT&T since 9:45 a.m. this morning testing their 9-1-1 networks. With the testing completed the PSAPs are confident emergency calls will be received.

AT&T advised the equipment failure occurred at one of their locations, which houses a large capacity carrier with numerous connections. Several PSAPs were affected. AT&T will continue to investigate the cause of the failure. It is unknown at this time how many customers were affected.

Kelley Odom, Assistant Manager for Reno Emergency Communications, advises, “Washoe County Dispatch, which is co-located with Reno Emergency Communications, helped us in providing uninterrupted service by being able to handle emergency medical calls that were unable to be transferred to medical services.”

The Regional Emergency Communications Center is the largest public safety communications center in Northern Nevada, and the primary link to public safety services in Reno and Washoe County, handling calls ranging from structure and wildland fires, to burglaries in progress, medical calls, domestic disputes, missing juveniles, and others.