Montgomery County among others impacted by Texas phone outage

All right, thanks for staying with us. We've got another half hour of news coming your way. We're going to start right now in Montgomery County. So you may have noticed, though, there are some power outages in Montgomery County that are, that is phone outages, excuse me, that's been impacting various government operations there. So you can see how that could be an issue. So we sent our McKenna Earnhardt to find some answers for us. She's joining us now live. McKenna? Yeah, Anthony, so this carrier glitch has been going on since about nine o'clock last night, and it's still causing headaches across Montgomery County. And so right now it's still pretty intermittent. That means that maybe once every few tries callers are getting through. But the main message from the dispatch center here behind me is do not call 911 just to report that these routine lines are not working. First responders know, and they need to keep those emergency lines open. So I just finished speaking with the Woodlands Fire Chief Palmer Buck and he tells us that the county's routine desk phones run over the internet and a statewide provider issue is what knocked them out. So that impacts courthouse desks, school campuses, animal shelters, and routine dispatch lines for fire and the sheriff's office. To adapt, dispatchers from fire, EMS, and the sheriff's office have actually been using secondary radio channels to talk directly to each other so no emergency calls drop. Officials stress that 911 was never affected and is working 100%. But if you have routine business... County business, per se, they ask you to hold off or send an email instead of jamming those emergency lines up. 9-1-1 systems were never affected by this. It's just been the administrative lines. But we did have people calling in to 9-1-1 and say, hey, I can't get through the administrative lines. Okay, we don't want that. Just be patient. And you can take care of that business tomorrow or the next day as they get this fixed. But not tying up the 9-1-1 system. Now, Chief Buck told me that technicians have been working around the clock to get this working, but that there's still no firm timeline on when it will all be fixed. So if you have any county business right now, the best answer is patience is a virtue as of now. Anthony. And McKenna, when you say intermittent, so you might call right now at 6.02, but let's say if you call tomorrow morning at 8, it might go through. Is that what I'm kind of hearing here? Yeah, so Anthony, I've actually tried a couple times today calling those non-emergency lines just to see, and I've gotten through maybe twice out of my five calls. So it's really just kind of 50-50 on when you're going to go through and when you're not. They're hoping to have it back up soon, though. All right, McKenna, thank you so much. Live for us in Montgomery County here, much appreciated.