City’s 911 System to Be Improved : Emergencies: Engineering firm will make repairs so a catastrophe will not knock out the entire network.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday agreed to hire an engineering firm to make repairs that are supposed to prevent the 911 emergency telephone system from failing in a catastrophe.

The unanimous vote came after at least five years of reports of potential problems and several near-failures of the system, according to city reports. The engineering firm that will make the repairs reported last year that the 911 system’s ability to survive failures and to operate under emergency conditions was “virtually nonexistent.”

The emergency phone system narrowly survived the Jan. 17 earthquake. But in March, a fire at a Pacific Bell switching station in Downtown Los Angeles disrupted phone service for nearly 12 hours and threw the 911 service into disarray.

That incident prompted city Controller Rick Tuttle to call for a review of both the city and phone company preparations for maintaining the emergency phone network during a disaster.

The city’s voters agreed in 1992 to raise property taxes to repay a $235-million bond issue to refurbish the 911 system. That proposal calls for two new dispatching centers, either of which is supposed to be able to manage the city’s emergency calls if the other fails.

Voters were told the repairs were urgent, with the 1992 riots cited as an example of how the 911 lines could be overwhelmed. But planning for the improvements is still going on and may take seven years or more, officials say.

Tuttle has said that is too long.

“It’s just outrageous to have a mind-set that is talking about seven to 10 years to complete that system,” Tuttle said. “We think that is unacceptably long and breaks faith with the voters.”

In the meantime, Tuttle has pushed for the interim repairs so that isolated failures cannot bring down the entire 911 system. Most of that work will be centered at the city’s Emergency Operations Center in the basement of City Hall East. That facility’s electronics were threatened with collapse because of a water leak after the January earthquake.

Pacific Bell is also working with the city to create a backup center for dispatching calls to the Emergency Operations Center, to prevent failures like the one after the March fire.