Emergency crews worked hard Thursday to figure out what caused a massive failure of the Spokane County radio dispatch system.
Communications for more than a dozen fire and law-enforcement agencies came to a stand-still from 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Wednesday. At the dispatch center, crews said they could answer 911 calls, but they had zero ability to talk to each other.
"We were on the scene of a rather large brush fire, along I-90, when all the communications simply stopped," said Spokane Assistant Fire Chief Brian Schaeffer. "The radio was dead, the network was completely down.”
It forced every on-duty cop, firefighter, paramedic and emergency responder back to a different era of communications. They relied mostly on cell phones and even built an on-scene radio system, all of which took up valuable time in an emergency.