A phone and internet outage impacted hospitals in Cortez and Durango as well as 911 communication services in Southwest Colorado for several hours Friday.
The outage was caused Friday afternoon when a construction crew working on Broadway Avenue in Cortez inadvertently cut a fiber line.
Central dispatch in Durango told The Durango Herald on Friday evening that 911 lines were down in Cortez, Ignacio, Telluride and Archuleta County, and calls were diverted to the Montrose County Sheriff’s Office, which would notify dispatch by radio.
The incident wreaked havoc on communication for area hospitals, but they implemented backup plans to avoid mishaps.
David Bruzzese, spokesperson for Mercy Regional Medical Center in Durango, said the hospital was able to work around the outage with hospital-provided cellphones and radios to communicate with its providers and staff.
“I was in contact with people at the hospital, helping coordinate communications, and as far as we know, there were no issues,” he said. “We also had the ability to work through our IT resources in Denver and reroute some of our telecommunications through a copper-based system.”
That allowed the hospital to make outbound calls on landlines, Bruzzese said.
“We had disaster plans in place, luckily,” said Tim Olson, IT help desk coordinator at Southwest Memorial Hospital in Cortez. “But it was kind of a nightmare.”
The hospital was unable to receive inbound phone calls, emails or faxes, and so kept in close contact with Mercy Regional Medical Center and Colorado State Patrol, Olson said.
“We just monitored the network and waited for everything to come back up,” he said. “We had to set up AT&T hot spots to keep our EMR system up for patient care. Unfortunately, AT&T went down as well, and that caused a big hitch in the process.”
Mark Molzen, CenturyLink spokesperson, said service was restored around 10 p.m.
But Montrose County Undersheriff Adam Murdie said calls from the Durango and Cortez areas were still rolling in around 1 a.m. Saturday. He said dispatch received about 140 additional calls from outside the Montrose jurisdiction, to the point where a few were even referred to Delta County.
“We had a whole bunch of calls come in from the whole southwest corner,” Murdie said. “When we were notified that everything went down, we brought in extra dispatchers – we went from two to six dispatchers. We had a couple channels set up to communicate back and forth between Durango and Cortez.”
Murdie said he would have more information about the nature and number of calls Monday.
jpace@durangoherald.com
