911 service outage impacts South Dakota [Video]

RAPID CITY, S.D. (KOTA) – Areas around the country lost access to 911 service Wednesday night, April 17, including all of South Dakota. The outage was reportedly caused by a fiber cut occurring during the installation of a light pole.

In Pennington County, officials acted quickly to notify the public.

Dustin Willett is Pennington County’s director of emergency management. When he heard of the outage, he quickly activated a wireless emergency alert. This system, developed by FEMA, allows emergency management officials to ping the cell phones of people in their county to notify them of an important message. The first message came at 8:02 PM, highlighting the outage and providing the numbers for non-emergency dispatch lines – which served as a way to contact emergency personnel while 911 was down. 14 minutes later, Willett and his team sent a follow-up alert telling the public not to dial 911 to test …