Emergency services in Saint Lucia were fully restored Thursday following a disruption that rendered the country’s key emergency telephone line 911 non-functional for several days.
The outage affected both the Saint Lucia Fire and Emergency Services and the Royal Saint Lucia Police Force, raising concerns about public safety and access to urgent assistance.
The 911 line is the country’s official emergency contact numbers for fire, medical, and police response. When functional, it provides immediate access to emergency personnel during fires, accidents, medical crises, and crimes.
However, with the system offline, citizens were left unable to reach help through the standard emergency channels.
“From since Tuesday it’s been down. We thought it was a short-term thing, but it does not appear to be that way. When people call the emergency lines they won’t get us, but we have emergency numbers to reach us,” an emergency first responder told the Saint Lucia Daily Post during the outage.
The Saint Lucia Fire Service had issued a Public Service Announcement online, alerting the public to a planned interruption in network services connected through the Government Wide Area Network (GWAN). The scheduled maintenance occurred from 10:30 p.m. on Friday, March 22 to 4:00 a.m. on Saturday, March 23, 2024, and affected both voice and data services.
Despite this announcement, the outage persisted well beyond the scheduled window, impacting the nation’s ability to respond to emergencies.
Both Digicel and Flow, the two main telecommunications providers on the island, service government agencies, including those responsible for emergency response. It is not yet clear whether the issue stemmed from infrastructure failures, network misconfigurations, or another source, and no joint statement has been issued by the telecoms or relevant government bodies explaining the extended outage.
During the downtime, the Fire Service published a list of mobile contact numbers for its regional stations, including those in Gros-Islet, Castries, Dennery, Micoud, Vieux-Fort, and Soufriere, in an attempt to maintain public access.
Gros-Islet: 4509111, 7120178, 7120168
Castries HQ: 4523334, 4517667, 7173715, 7196267, 7196260, 7282888
Dennery: 4534380, 7120158, 7120167
Micoud: 4544000, 7120194, 7120220
Vieux-Fort: 4546330, 7203326, 7220700, 7202538
Soufriere: 4597448, 7120232, 7120234
The disruption of these emergency lines posed a serious risk to public safety, as citizens were temporarily unable to call for help using the well-known emergency numbers. Authorities have not publicly confirmed the exact cause of the extended outage or whether additional safeguards will be implemented to prevent future disruptions.
As of Thursday, normal service had resumed, and the 911 emergency line was once again operational.
