Get Full Government Meeting Transcripts, Videos, & Alerts Forever!
Get email alerts on the 911 Data Center Outage topic
No spam. Unsubscribe anytime.
Backup outage at county data center prompts review and move plan for 9-1-1 equipment
Summary
A weekend power incident and a failed UPS left some 9‑1‑1 dispatch consoles offline; county staff described steps to decontaminate and relocate equipment and discussed potential multimillion-dollar costs to move the data center.
Cayuga County staff told legislators that a weekend power problem left backup equipment in the county office building’s basement offline, taking several 9‑1‑1 dispatch consoles out of service and prompting plans to decontaminate, test and possibly relocate critical equipment.
Tom, the county official who briefed the legislature on infrastructure projects, said there was “a failure of the UPS system” and several brownouts over the weekend that contributed to the outage. He said vendor troubleshooting is under way and that some dispatch consoles “are not powering on.”
Tom said the immediate steps are to extract the affected equipment from the basement, have it decontaminated and then run vendor diagnostics; low-cost fixes such as power‑supply swaps are being considered. He said relocating the county’s data center and 9‑1‑1 backup from the county office building will require planning and could be costly. “It would be millions of dollars?… Millions. At least 1,000,000. At least,” he said when asked about cost estimates for moving and retrofitting another site.
Legislators and staff discussed moving portions of the 9‑1‑1 equipment temporarily to Auburn Fire Department, where fiber connectivity work and other infrastructure upgrades are underway to improve resilience. Tom said fiber connectivity work and new Motorola dispatch consoles are expected to align in the October–November timeframe; the county is coordinating with Motorola and other vendors on equipment readiness and timelines.
County participants described six dispatch consoles in the affected space and characterized each console as a significant cost item; Tom said consoles can be “six figures a piece.” Lawmakers urged prioritizing the data‑center move and agreed to meet with Tom and other staff to develop a plan and cost estimate.
The legislature did not adopt final funding during the session; Tom said prior internal plans were paused for financial reasons earlier in the summer and that staff will follow up with estimates and a plan for moving the equipment.
