County 911 recertified by FEMA; commissioners approve radio network agreement with Pennsylvania State Police

Mifflin County’s 911 center received a FEMA recertification in June and commissioners on July 15 approved an intergovernmental agreement to connect the county’s 911 radio system to the Pennsylvania State Police network.

Josh Miller, the county’s 911 supervisor, told the board FEMA examined training and quality-assurance files and found the center “compliant and either meet or exceed their plan.”

County staff also briefed commissioners on a recent statewide outage that affected Pennsylvania’s NextGen 911 migration. Staff described that the state moved from a legacy system to a NextGen 911 architecture this spring, routing carriers’ call data through a state system before delivery to counties. The migration improves redundancy and IP-based features, staff said, but some firewall hardware treated the new traffic pattern as an external attack, which caused multiple redundant systems to block traffic and resulted in calls not reaching 911 centers.

“Everything was in the file. We are compliant and either meet or exceed their plan,” Miller said about the FEMA recertification. County staff said roughly 70,000 calls were processed during an eight-hour period when the incident occurred and about 6,800 calls (around 10%) never reached a 911 center. Staff said local ancillary systems and dispatcher follow-up allowed many callers to be contacted despite the outage.

To improve interoperability, the commissioners approved by voice vote an intergovernmental agreement that will let the county join the state police radio network for direct communications with local barracks and surrounding agencies. County staff said the state police will provide a central connection point and the county will perform radio programming and install some hardware; staff said a full system-wide upgrade is not required. The agreement was described as formalizing practices used previously and improving incident visibility and cross-agency communication.

County staff said the state expects to implement an August 1 mitigation that will allow calls to be routed directly to counties if the state system is offline — effectively reverting to legacy routing when necessary.

Why it matters: the FEMA recertification validates county training and QA for 911 operations. The radio-network agreement aims to improve real-time communications between county and state law enforcement. The NextGen outage and the planned fixes highlight operational risks that counties and the state are addressing.

What happens next: county 911 staff will complete technical integration with the state police network and monitor the state’s August mitigation work. Staff said they will receive a formal incident report in mid-August summarizing findings and fixes.