December 25, 2020
By: Dwayne Page
An AT&T outage related to the explosion in Nashville Christmas morning is causing issues with calling 911 from cellular phones in much of Middle Tennessee, including DeKalb County.
Due to the outage, anyone with an emergency needing to call 911 is urged to use a landline rather than a cell phone or call the DeKalb Central Dispatch non-emergency line at 615-215-3000 until further notice.
Bradley Mullinax, Director of the DeKalb County E-911 Center, and Charlie Parker, DeKalb Emergency Management Agency Coordinator, have issued the following statement.
“Due to the recent RV explosion in Nashville, all 911 traffic from cell-phones and wireless devices has been affected. The explosion in Nashville impacted the AT&T network operations center resulting in the inability for 911 calls to be routed to the appropriate county. In addition, we have noticed that all AT&T cell phones are down for calls and texts”.
“At this time, we do not know when service will be restored to the Nashville center. However, service technicians are working to route traffic through a redundant network center located at other locations in the state. We want to stress this is not a local problem with our communications center or our local telephone providers. 911 calls placed from landline or traditional home telephones have not been affected and continue to work as usual. If you have an emergency, please utilize a landline or phone or call our non-emergency line at 615-215-3000. We will continue to monitor the situation in Nashville, and we will update local media when we receive notifications”.
“Finally, this outage will not impact our ability to dispatch local responders to your location, but again please use our 10 digit non-emergency number for any public safety request at 615-215-3000,” the statement concluded.
According to Metro Nashville Police, “MNPD, FBI, and ATF are investigating Friday’s intentional 6:30 a.m. explosion of an RV outside 166 2nd Avenue North downtown. Vehicle and pedestrian traffic downtown is restricted as the investigation continues”.
“Officers responded to a shots fired call on 2nd Avenue at approximately 5:30 a.m. Friday morning. The department’s Hazardous Devices Unit was called to check an RV. As those officers were enroute, the vehicle exploded outside an A-T-&-T transmission building. Multiple buildings on 2nd Avenue were damaged, some extensively”. Three people reportedly suffered minor injuries.