CHAFFEE COUNTY SHERIFF’S OFFICE

Salida, Colorado

PRESS RELEASE

July 9, 2018

On July 9, 2018, I, Sheriff John Spezze was contacted by Susan Sherwood, Senior Manager of 911 Compliance for Verizon Wireless. Ms Sherwood advised that she was calling after she was contacted by the FCC in regards to a complaint I filed on Verizon Wireless.

This complaint was filed after a wildfire in southern Colorado damaged fiber optic belonging to Charter/Spectrum. Verizon utilizes this fiber and after it became damaged cell service on the Verizon network was disrupted beginning Friday afternoon, June 9^th and continued to be inoperable until Tuesday, July 3^rd. During this outage most of Chaffee County on the Verizon Network could not call 911 provided by the Chaffee County Communications Center nor could the Chaffee County Comm Center reach Verizon customers by way of Everbridge, reverse 911, because the Verizon network was inoperable throughout most of Chaffee County.

I explained to her in great detail the issues on the Verizon network in both northern Chaffee County as well as in the southern end of the county. This included the most recent outing and the public safety issues these outages have caused because there is no redundancy built into the network.

She assured me that Verizon understands the gravity of the situation and they will be looking into the issues and what can be done to fix the situation. She stated that she would update me on the issues as soon as there was anything to report.

For more information please contact Chaffee County Sheriff John Spezze.