Members of Congress from Vermont and New Hampshire have called on the Federal Communications Commission to assess the ability of FairPoint Communications to operate emergency communications networks in both states following outages last year.
A letter was was sent to the FCC chairman by Vermont Senators Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy and Representative Peter Welch; and New Hampshire Senator Jeanne Shaheen and Representative Annie Kuster.
Welch says the delegation is concerned that service issues are becoming worse as about 1,800 FairPoint workers in northern New England continue their strike. “This is a great concern and obviously on the emergency issues you just have to have a rock-solid, confident system that going to make certain that people’s emergency needs are attended to immediately.”
There was a six-hour outage of Vermont's 911 system in November and a four-hour outage of Portsmouth, New Hampshire 911 services in December.
The Associated Press contributed to this report. Copyright 2015. All rights reserved.