DeKalb County 911 call center brought back online after brief Saturday outage

SYCAMORE – Everything is back up and running now, but for a period of time Saturday morning the DeKalb County 911 call center could only assist those who texted them.

DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Jim Burgh said their office, which is responsible for the 911 call center, began dealing with issues to their nonemergency line around 2 a.m. Saturday morning, but as the sun was getting ready to rise the issues got worse.

“We’re working with the ETSB [Emergency Telephone System Board] director still, trying to figure out what may have caused it,” Burgh said about 10:30 a.m. Saturday. “We don’t really have an answer of why it happened but everything is up and running.”

At about 6 a.m. Saturday the DeKalb County 911 call center began dealing with issues that prevented calls for help from being received.

The issues at the call center lasted until about 9 a.m.

“They’ve had no more issues since then,” Burgh said. “We keep calling, doing our own test calls, making sure it’s coming in.”

Authorities took the moment to remind residents that there are additional ways to reach 911 in emergencies.

The DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office notified the public to the call center outage on social media and instructed anyone needing emergency services to text 911 because that function remained operational.

The 911 texting system is less than a year old, Burgh said. And although it allowed DeKalb County residents to have another option when the call-based 911 service was down, none used it.

Burgh said the public should know the text-based service works the same way as the call-based service everyone has grown accustomed to.

“Just send in whatever the emergency is, or whatever you need, and that will come across to one of our dispatchers, whoever is working 911 that night,” Burgh said.