FARMINGTON – A voltage spike cooked the circuit boards of the nonemergency phone system at the Franklin County Sheriffs Office and jail Friday. It did not affect the 911 emergency lines.
Those calling on the regular phone lines were not able to get through for more than five hours.
In order to make repairs to a generator at the jail complex, Sheriff Dennis Pike said the power had to be shut off for three seconds and then turned back on.
In the process, the voltage spiked and burned out circuit boards, Pike said.
The Teletype was down for about 30 minutes, he said.
Dispatchers had to use cell phones to make outgoing calls, Pike said.
Anyone calling during the phone system outage would just hear ringing, he said.
The phones went out at 11 a.m. and were still not operating at 5 p.m.
Equipment was being brought up from Portland to fix the system.
A new battery pack for the phone system will be put in place in an effort to prevent such an interruption from happening again, Pike said.
Pike said the surge shouldn’t have happened in the first place and is being looked into.
dperry@sunjournal.com
Send questions/comments to the editors.
Success. Please wait for the page to reload. If the page does not reload within 5 seconds, please refresh the page.
Enter your email and password to access comments.
Hi, to comment on stories you must . This profile is in addition to your subscription and website login.
Already have a commenting profile? .
Invalid username/password.
Please check your email to confirm and complete your registration.
Only subscribers are eligible to post comments. Please subscribe or login first for digital access. Here’s why.
Use the form below to reset your password. When you've submitted your account email, we will send an email with a reset code.