Police ready for next time

By Leon Engelbrecht, ITWeb senior writer

Johannesburg, 09 Apr 2008

Police will be more ready for the next calamity to befall the R600 million 10111 contact centre, in Midrand, says national spokesman captain Dennis Adriao.

The centre, opened in October, handles all emergency calls to the police dialled in Gauteng. On Friday afternoon, a building contractor on the East Rand knocked a Telkom pole with a grader, drooping the cables carried on the pole low enough for a passing truck to snag and break.

The breakage, around 4.12pm, cut off telephone and data communications to and from the 10111 centre for several hours.

"The biggest dilemma was complainants phoning in, who could not get through," says Adriao. "We had backups in place and did the scenarios. In theory, they seemed to work. This incident has necessitated a relook."

Adriao says the public should remember when not getting through to 10111 that they can also phone 112 or 10777 to get police assistance - or they can phone their local police station.

He adds that the police have three other 10111 contact centres active in the province to handle spill-over from Midrand. They are the old Brixton, Benoni and Pretoria 10111 dispatch centres. "We will keep them going for some time as backup and for overflow," Adriao added. The Benoni centre was, in fact, employed Friday night, while Midrand was out of action.

Telkom`s take

Telkom spokesperson Nabintu Petsana says the truck snagged three transmission links.

"One of the affected links directly impacted nine of the 12 ISDN primary rate systems, which provide services to the Midrand 10111 centre," she adds.

"The company`s network operations centre personnel, in their endeavour to minimise the effect of the service interruption, restricted downtime on the damaged SAPS links to eight hours and 18 minutes. This was done by temporarily diverting traffic, while on-site technical personnel continued repairing the fibre break," she adds.

"The damaged optic fibre links were out of service ... from 16:12 on Friday to 10:20 the next morning. Given the urgency of the situation, technical personnel worked throughout the night in order to carry out the repair as quickly as possible."