Eighteen Minutes of Battery: A CAD Outage With a Generator That Already Failed
03:05. The CAD workstation freezes, then all four positions lose the server. The 911 trunk group still delivers calls to the backup positions, but the ANI/ALI display is blank on two of them. The UPS reports 18 minutes remaining. The generator failed its last load test nine days ago and facilities has an open ticket. Your radio console is on its own UPS and unaffected, but the logging recorder shows a fault light. A text-to-911 message arrives asking for police at a specific address. Two officers are on traffic stops and one deputy is en route to a welfare check. Your agency's downtime procedure lives in a binder in the supervisor's office, and the supervisor is off-site.
1. You have 18 minutes of battery. What do you keep running, what do you shed, and in what order?
Read the worked answer
Treat the UPS as a countdown, not a status: assume it is shorter under load than displayed and act as if you have ten minutes.
Keep: the 911 call path above everything - with no ANI/ALI you still answer calls and take verbal addresses, which is the entire function of the center; the radio console, which is on separate power and is your only reliable link to the field; and one workstation with the best remaining battery for text-to-911 and lookups.
Shed, in order: non-essential workstations, printers, secondary monitor stacks, anything drawing from the same UPS that is not serving a live call. Do not keep rebooting the CAD server - you will burn battery and someone else's time for nothing. Switch immediately to paper and stop waiting for CAD to return.
In parallel, not afterward: call on-call IT with the fault, call facilities with the nine-day-old generator ticket number and ask for a fuel and start check, and notify the off-site supervisor. The generator is the real problem; the battery window exists so you can solve it calmly. Write the power-loss time down as your first paper entry.
2. How do you notify field units of the outage, and what do you avoid saying on the air?
Read the worked answer
One short, calm broadcast per active channel: 'All units, county CAD is down. Dispatch is on backup - give your location verbally on every transmission and keep radio traffic to what is necessary.'
Avoid: the cause, which you do not know and which becomes rumor the moment you guess; any wording that suggests you cannot hear them; and the phrase 'phones are down,' which tells a scanner listener something useful. Avoid apologetic framing - field units take their tone from you, and if they believe the center is out of service they will start calling each other and self-dispatching, which is more dangerous than the outage.
Also avoid blasting one broadcast on every channel from a single console if that leaves a channel unmonitored. The two officers on traffic stops need to be told to call in their locations verbally, because their last CAD entry may never have saved. The deputy on the welfare check needs an address confirmation more than a status update - give that directly, because he is about to arrive somewhere and you cannot verify where.
3. The text-to-911 message and the recorder fault: what must you capture by hand, and why does it matter later?
Read the worked answer
Capture on paper, verbatim: the text as received, the arrival time, the callback number, the address as typed, the unit assigned, the time of assignment, the handling telecommunicator, the channel used, and the fact that ANI/ALI was blank.
Why it matters: the logging recorder is showing a fault, so the automatic record of that call may not exist. A text-to-911 conversation is also harder to reconstruct than voice - there is no one to call back reliably, no spoken address to re-listen to, and the transcript may be the only evidence that a request for help arrived and when.
That paper becomes the agency's account if the call is later questioned in a records request, a civil claim, or a response-time review. Contemporaneous notes carry weight; reconstructed ones do not. Write times as they happen, initial corrections rather than erasing, transfer text messages to paper before the battery fails, and hand the sheet to the supervisor at shift end rather than keeping it in a pocket.