RIPLEY -- An unexplained system failure early Monday afternoon, Aug. 17, placed Tippah E-911 dispatchers in a situation they’d never experienced before.

At 12:51 p. m. Monday, all phone lines into the Tippah County E-911 dispatch center went dead.

The shutdown included all 10 phones lines, including E-911. That meant that any phone calls to the sheriff's office, jail, investigators’ offices, dispatch, or E-911 stopped working.

The shutdown did not affect any of the seven radio channels used to dispatch calls but would not allow dispatchers to take or transfer any emergency phone calls.

The on-duty dispatcher, Lou Ann Roland, said the complete and eerie silence was strange during a normal workday.

Tippah County's dispatch center handles over 62,000 phone calls each year with approximately 12,000 of them being E-911.

"We've had individual telephones and phone lines go down occasionally for various reasons, but never the entire phone communications system," she said.

As employees followed normal procedures to reset the system and reboot computers, it soon became apparent that the problem was something never experienced before.

Lou Ann quickly made contact with technical support personnel in Atlanta, Ga., to help solve the mystery.

In a short period of time, all E-911 calls were rerouted to Union County dispatchers who immediately started answering emergency calls for Tippah County.

Call information was then transferred directly to the Tippah County Hospital or back to Lou Ann on her cellphone where she dispatched the calls normally.

"I know several of the dispatchers in Union and they are a great bunch of folks," Lou Ann said "They started answering our calls and did a great job of picking up the additional workload to help us."

Tippah County Sheriff Karl Gaillard thanked Union County personnel for their professionalism and the help that they provided.

"They were experiencing some of their own technical problems when I first talked with them, and they never hesitated to offer their help any way they could," the sheriff said.

Technicians from Alabama and Mississippi got the dispatch center phones back in service by 10 p. m. that night and completed the remaining repairs the next day. The problem was found to be a main phone switch which had failed, the sheriff said.