Cut cable reveals more call centers are needed: Are you listening Mayor Salinas??

Mayor Raul "Jobs, job jobs" Salinas needs to get moving fast!

The gist of the article below is that the recent fiber optic cable that was cut locally created pandemonium throughout South Texas. There is a growing consensus that more call centers are needed to avoid a repeat of the chaos that ensued last time locally and in the Valley (see article). OK, so here's the deal- how soon can the Mayor and his travelling buddies use this information to go and land themselves a couple of call centers for Laredo, always a reason to celebrate The Gateway City?

Of course, they are not the high-paying, top level, Eagle Ford Shale jobs that San Antonio is stealing from our city stooges leaders, but in this economy, every bit helps.

From KRGV.com
By Joe Agustine

Operators are making sure everyone in the Valley can call 911. That service was disrupted Wednesday night after an AT&T fiber optic line was cut near Laredo. Most of the problems were fixed by 11:30 Thursday morning, but the outage helped highlight a major problem with 911 call centers here in the Valley.

911 call centers in the Valley help back up other call centers in South Texas. So when there is a problem in Laredo, the center in Harlingen will pick up the calls. The problem is that the center can't handle so much traffic.

Anyone calling from a cell phone or a landline Wednesday night probably got through to a 911 operator. The operator couldn't transfer calls to police or fire departments. Instead, they had to use their own cell phones to call firefighters and police officers. It turned into one big mess that delayed response times.

A director at the 911 center in Weslaco says this is the biggest crisis he's seen in more than 10 years. It put nearly 1 million people at risk. It shows South Texas needs more call centers.

“This was a major artery that they cut up there, and that meant all the calls had to find different ways of getting out. So that cut between San Antonio and Laredo impacted several different telephone networks,” says 911 Assistant Director Stephen Tice.

Tice doesn't know how many emergency calls were affected.