Government officials in Jackson County are evaluating a problem that happened earlier this week when a contractor doing some work on communications equipment disabled the 911 Center in Jefferson.
Steve Nichols, the Jackson County Emergency Management Agency Director, said in an email the service went down about 12:45 a.m. Monday and was out until 4:30 that same morning. He said emergency calls were quickly re-routed to Hall County, and county officials did not believe any calls were lost during the outage.
Officials said a private contractor for Windstream Communications was replacing some of the system components near the Jackson County Courthouse on General Jackson Parkway when the outage occurred. The replacement work shut the phone systems down.
The email indicated that government offices were not notified of the outage and only learned about it when the alarms in the 911 Center sounded that there was a problem.
Windstream officials are conducting an investigation into the incident, as well.
