A car that crashed into a utility pole in Poulsbo Dec. 31 took out use of the landline 911 system in parts of East Jefferson County and took down the medical records system for Jefferson Healthcare for more than a day.

Both CenturyLink, which owns the aerial line that was taken out, and Jefferson Healthcare have learned from the outage and are planning for system redundancies.

CenturyLink spokesperson Kerry Zimmer said the car crashed into a power pole on Clear Creek Road north of Sherman Hill Road, split the pole in half and burst into flames, requiring response from the Poulsbo Fire Department.

The crash severed aerial fiber and caused an estimated 9,500 customers to be unable to make phone calls, including landline-based 911 calls, in Kitsap and Jefferson counties, from 1 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 31 until about 9 p.m., Jan. 1, Zimmer said.

Jefferson Healthcare CEO Mike Glenn told hospital commissioners Jan. 4 that the event has prompted officials to explore ways to bypass that particular route to ensure access to Epic, an electronic medical records system. CenturyLink serves the hospital for its voice-only phone system. The hospital uses Wave Broadband for its data circuits and fiber. Wave’s cables were on the same damaged utility pole, Glenn said. He said hospital officials are meeting with Wave representatives to understand the incident’s timeline.

“It was a prolonged outage, and it stretched due to the holiday,” Glenn said of the New Year’s Day incident.

Glenn said it was his understanding that because of the holiday, there was limited support for repairing the problem.

Zimmer said CenturyLink was “on it immediately,” but that the fire had to be extinguished and a pole needed to be installed before the aerial lines could be reattached.

“There was a huge fire going on on the pole, and the pole’s integrity had to be restored first,” she said.

Zimmer said the incident was first reported at about 1 p.m. on Dec. 31. She said she didn’t issue the all-clear notice that phone service had been restored until 9 p.m. on Jan. 1.

“We try to make sure anything dedicated to critical services comes up first,” she said. The hospital in Port Townsend would be considered a critical system.

Jefferson County’s Emergency Operations Center reported on its Nixle system that Port Ludlow’s 911 system was not working at 5:18 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 31 and then, two hours later, reported that landlines for 911 and parts of Ludlow were not working, but that it was OK to call 911 on cell phones.

A Port Ludlow resident told The Leader that their cell phone and landline phone service went out at about 5 p.m., Dec. 31 and was restored at about 3:30 a.m., Jan. 1.

Zimmer also acknowledged there is a lack of redundancy of phone lines “in that market right now.”

As a result of the incident, she said, there is talk of looking at what kinds of redundancy systems might be needed.

“It’s a lot more than putting a pole in the ground. It’s a process we go through,” Zimmer said of improving the system.

NO ONE HURT

Glenn said Jefferson Healthcare patients were not harmed because of the lack of connection with Epic, and that in some cases, patients were able to go home, access their MyChart records through another system and bring information into their providers.

Since the $4.7 million electronic records system went on line in the summer of 2013, Epic has been down for tweaks and changes, but never for more than a day, Glenn told commissioners.

Glenn said officials have learned that “there are a whole lot of carriers that are tied to that one line.”

“We’ll plan for an event that probably won’t happen for another 10 years,” Glenn said. “We got through it and we learned from it.”

Glenn said that officials had always talked about how, if a new facility were built, people would come. He said they have been coming, but the shutdown of Epic was not helping.

The 38-year-old Silverdale man driving the car that crashed was transported to Harrison Medical Center in Bremerton with non-life-threatening injuries, according to a report from the Poulsbo Fire Department.