WILKES-BARRE, LUZERNE COUNTY (WBRE/WYOU)— The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) says they are actively troubleshooting the 9-1-1 system to find the cause of the issue.
28/22's Avery Nape has the latest with what we know so far about the outages.
PEMA emphasizes that the issues have been intermittent throughout the day but backup procedures are in place in the event of an emergency.
Around 2:00 p.m. Friday afternoon, Delaware County's 9-1-1 center began experiencing outages with its 9-1-1 system.
Next Generation 9-1-1, Pennsylvania's 9-1-1 service provider, soon alerted the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency of the problem.
PEMA says it immediately began troubleshooting and issued a state-wide mobile alert as a precaution.
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"We understand this is concerning because people want to have faith in the 9-1-1 system, like I said, we have procedures in place to be able to kind of troubleshoot this and determine whether it is a network issue, whether it's a software, or hardware issue or whether it lies sometimes outside of the network," explained Randy Padfield, Director of Emergency Management, Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.
Padfield emphasizes that the outages were intermittent, but that a cause is yet to be identified.
He says that some calls are going through as normal, others go through with missing location or number data the next-gen system provides, others are not going through at all.
Until the system is fixed, anyone experiencing an emergency in Luzerne County should call the 9-1-1 center's non-emergency line.
"(570) 819-4916 should any resident of the city of Wilkes-Barre need emergency services, that's the number they should call," voiced Chief Jay Delaney, Wilkes-Barre City Fire Department.
For other counties, those numbers can usually be found on the county's website.
PEMA says you should continue to use 9-1-1 as normal, but don't call for the sake of testing the system.
That can create challenges with traffic coming in. They say the system has performed flawlessly through severe weather, and that Friday's outages are unusual.
"This is more of an anomaly for us and for the next gen 9-1-1 service provider. So to have something like this happen and have it intermittent and sporadic so we're definitely taking a look at that and we want to resolve it in the shortest amount of time possible," said Padfield.
Padfield added that 9-1-1 outages are not completely unheard of but that the sporadic nature of the ones Friday are odd.
