The statewide emergency phone system operated by FairPoint Communications was not working in several Vermont communities Friday evening, according to emergency services agencies scrambling to find workarounds for people to reach them.
The state issued a new $11 million, five-year contract for the system's operations to FairPoint Communications and the company took over the "E-911" system earlier this month.
WCAX has published a list of some contact phone numbers for local emergency services, but for the time being, dialing 911 is not certain to connect Vermonters in need to emergency services.
FairPoint Communications has seen an increasing number of complaints from consumers since workers went on strike in October.
Update 12/1/2014 9:55 a.m. The system came back online for all affected communities four hours after the outage began.
E-911 Executive Director David Tucker said at least 45 people tried to call 911 during the outage and officials are now working to contact those people, though he added that the state isn't likely to ever have a complete list of those who called.
Tucker said the 911 system is usually busy between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m. - a time span included in Friday's outage.
This post was originally published with the headline "Statewide 911 System Offline In Many Communities."
