City’s Excavation Work Caused 9-1-1 Outage Across Santa Barbara County

A broken Frontier Communications fiber line was repaired and 9-1-1 service restored to Santa Barbara County by 9 a.m., the City of Santa Barbara announced Wednesday morning. The outage on Tuesday, July 22 not only made speaking to 9-1-1 dispatchers impossible, but it disrupted internet service and Frontier land line service across the county. The breakdown also halted operations at Santa Barbara Airport (SBA) for 21 hours, which affected air operations from San Luis Obispo to Los Angeles counties.

City Engineer Brian D’Amour explained that the break occurred during the city’s retrofit of the Mission Creek bridge at De la Vina Street. Excavation work just south of the project caused the interruption in Frontier’s fiber network. D’Amour thought that beyond the effect on 9-1-1 emergency calls, “Other services were not impacted because they do not run through this location.”

Stating the break was an accident, City Manager Kelly McAdoo added that the fiber line belonged to Frontier Communications, and that a Frontier team worked overnight to re-splice the line together.

On Tuesday, emergency services across the county had scrambled to get information out to residents for alternatives to calling 9-1-1, including texting to 9-1-1 and other phone numbers to call that were still operational. Sheriff’s spokesperson Raquel Zick said that all dispatchers were taking calls and routing them to the appropriate agency. They fielded about 150 9-1-1 calls a day, she said.

The ripple effect among airports started when the broken fiber line put Santa Barbara Airport’s traffic control tower out of commission around 11 a.m. on Tuesday. Even more importantly, the approach and departure control facility — which tracks aircraft as it enters and leaves SBA airspace — went down. Chris Hastert, Santa Barbara airport director, explained that facility was a critical piece of infrastructure under the control of the Federal Aviation Administration. “For the people looking at radar scopes and talking to aircraft, that’s totally handled by the FAA during departures or when they enter the area from south of Ventura or north of Paso Robles,” said Hastert.

The FAA imposed a ground stop on SBA by around noon. “The lights were on, the phones were working, the terminal was online,” Hastert said, but airline and general commercial, or private, aircraft headed for other air spaces could not depart.

The tower in Santa Barbara manages air space throughout the county and San Luis Obispo, said Courtney Pene, director of San Luis Obispo’s airport. SLO’s operations were halted for about 90 minutes, Pene said, and resumed after Los Angeles Center — a facility in Palmdale that controls en route traffic over Southern and Central California — “assumed responsibility for the affected airspace, allowing arrivals and departures at SBP [San Luis airport] to proceed as normal.”

Hastert said he didn’t know what arrangement San Luis Obispo had with Los Angeles Center, but Santa Barbara Airport had no such capacity nor a redundant backup system to the Frontier line. City Manager McAdoo said she was in talks with the county’s executive, Mona Miyasato, to bring cities together to “develop more redundancy in our fiber connections to these critical systems.”

About 20 flights were cancelled or diverted from Santa Barbara Airport, affecting an estimated 2,000 passengers. Hastert said the airlines were routing flights back to Santa Barbara, after the airport was able to reopen around 11 a.m. on July 23. He thought flights should return to normal by the end of the day and said that passengers should check with their airline for flight status.

Tuesday was a low-tech day around the county, with service spotty or slow on Frontier land lines and internet service. Buellton’s City Manager Scott Wolfe was on one of the last planes to be diverted from Santa Barbara Airport, and he said he was diverted to San Bernardino County. “I was attending meetings remotely from Ontario,” said Wolfe, “and I could tell there were some internet difficulties here.”