Late Monday night, a Haines dispatcher got a call that a vehicle was on fire at 30 Mile of the highway. The caller hung up so the dispatcher was not able to confirm basic details. So, they assumed it was the Haines Highway and sounded the alarm for volunteers to respond.
It was nearly midnight and firefighters scrambled to meet at the Haines’ public safety building to gear up. But as it turns out, the call was coming from Juneau – a fact discovered after Chilkat Valley News editor Rashah McChesney, called dispatchers to flag that a similar call had been made about an hour before in Juneau where Capital City Fire/Rescue confirmed that multiple vehicles were on fire along that community’s Glacier Highway.
Multiple borough staff and emergency responders said this kind of emergency call mis-routing from Juneau to Haines is rare but does happen.
The technical explanation is that a 911 call’s routing depends on factors including the caller’s proximity to the nearest tower, service boundaries, and network load, said Haines Borough technology consultant Austin Neal, with Altera Consult.
Neal wrote in an email that in some of the farther reaches of Juneau’s cell coverage area, the caller’s signal may ping a tower that is technically outside of Juneau’s 911 response area.
“This has occurred, although very infrequently, for many years and to my knowledge is not an equipment malfunction or a glitch, just [a] peculiarity in the way cell signals travel,” he wrote.
He said the call and location data should show dispatchers that it is not originating in Haines and then they can alert Juneau emergency responders.
Haines Volunteer Fire Department Chief Brian Clay said it has happened a couple of times a year. In this case, personnel got to the fire hall but “that was about it before we got the stand-down call.”
In a separate issue, Verizon customers in the Chilkat Valley are having problems with 911 routing as well.
When dialing the emergency line, callers were instead reaching the Haines Borough Police Department’s non-emergency number, which is a recorded answering machine that routes callers to different departments and not directly to a dispatcher.
Neal said this is a Verizon routing issue.
“The Haines Borough has a 911 communications contractor who is currently working with Verizon’s engineers to address this and we expect that it will be resolved shortly,” he wrote.
Until it is resolved, Neal said the answering machine system for the non-emergency line has been disabled and now all calls will reach a live operator.
No one from Verizon answered questions about why the issue is occurring or how they’re likely to resolve it. But emergency call routing has been a long-running issue for Verizon both in Alaska and the rest of the country.
In Juneau, 911 service for Verizon customers was out briefly in mid-December of 2024. A similar issue happened in 2016 according to a Juneau police department information release detailing a citizen who attempted to call 911. The call did not go through.
The company has also paid millions in fines levied by the Federal Communications Commission after 911 outages in 2014 that impacted more than 11 million people and two more in late 2022 that affected Verizon customers across six states.