Emergency 911 calls back online after brief hiatus during lunch hour Sunday

Lavaca County Emergency Management Coordinator Egon Barthels sent out an emergency alert at 12:56 p.m. Sunday via the county’s CodeRED emergency alert system stating that Lavaca County 911 phones were now restored after a 44-minute shutdown countywide.

The initial call came at 12:12 p.m. that day, notifying residents the service was down.

Expect delays, Barthels said, adding that he would send out a new message just as soon as the service was restored locally.

All incoming calls were temporarily rerouted to Jackson County.

Barthels also told the newspaper that he wasn't certain as to the cause of Sunday's loss of service.

Lavaca County is in the process of a roughly $2 million upgrade to its countywide emergency communications system with Motorola, a project funded mostly by the federal government as part of the county's pandemic relief money that was operating on a Sept. 1 deadline. 

It was not clear on Sunday, however, if the outage and the installation/powering up of that new system might have been related.

Despite the project having had a Sept. 1 target date when it last discussed with the newspapers, Lavaca County Judge Mark Myers told us Monday that Motorola said the upgrade project could now be extended out as far as Oct. 1, though they are hoping to have it completed before then.