The Board of Commissioners for the Communications District of St. Tammany Parish agreed to wait for an analysis from AT&T on how the 911 emergency system failed in most of the parish when Hurricane Gustav blew through last week.

At the board’s meeting Wednesday, AT&T Regional Vice-President for government and education accounts Debbie Griffith told the board she has asked for a detailed analysis of the failure, and she could not really address the issue until she had studied the analysis.

“There were probably multiple factors involved, but we don’t have the analysis yet,” Griffith said. Communications District of St. Tammany Director Woody Glover gave the board an overview of the failure and told how his crew, with the help of AT&T technicians, were able to solve the problem.

AT&T admitted that two cables carrying the 911 system from the parish broke down at the same time, but they don’t know why the cables failed.

Glover said all 911 emergency calls are routed to tandem switching stations in New Orleans, then routed back to the Sheriff’s Office through the two cables. One of the cables comes in from LaPlace, and the other comes across the Rigolets.

When the cables went down at the height of the hurricane, Glover said 911 operators could not recieve calls from the east side of the parish.

Amazingly, the Mandeville circuits were not lost, and neither were 911 calls made from cellular phones. But the 911 center in Covington could not get any calls.

Glover and his deputy director Jack Varnado were able to get online with AT&T personnel in the parish, and they started to switch 911 calls to seven-digit numbers that connected the calls to the administrative offices in the police and fire departments in the parts of the parish that had lost 911 service.

Glover said it took about two hours to switch everything over.

“By Monday, we had some of the network back up,” Glover said.

He said it was a good thing the rerouting had worked, because the system broke down again on Tuesday, including cell phones. But by Wednesday, Glover said the entire system was back online.

However, during the rerouting, there was no location information with the emergency calls. All that information which is necessary for police and fire to respond to the correct location are in the two tandem switching stations in New Orleans.

Varnado said Hurricane Katrina had showed some problems with the system that had been addressed, but he said the most frustrating problem was not having the trained AT&T personnel available to help the parish.

“We were promised to have trained people,” Varnado said. “We had made all the preparations but couldn’t go with it because of this weak link.”

He suggested AT&T should let the parish do remote call forwarding with instructions.

“We could have forwarded all of them to the Sheriff’s Office immediately,” Varnado said.

A board member suggested that AT&T build a tandem switching center on the Northshore. Glover said an answer may be connecting to the switching system in Baton Rouge.

But the concern returned to AT&T personnel with the right information.

“I’m worried about information being passed on from retiring AT&T personnel to others,” said Charles Simenoux of the Mandeville Police Department.

Griffith said she would look into the human resources issue as soon as the meeting was over. All the other suggestions would have to wait until the analysis of the failure was finished, she told the board.

Board Chariman Tom Buell agreed and said they would schedule another meeting with AT&T next month to discuss the analysis.

“Let’s find out what happened and work on it,” Buell said.