CHICAGO, July 23 (UPI) -- Chicago's state-of-the-art emergency communications center is running on normal power a day after an electrical glitch knocked out 911 service.
Calls were switched to the city's non-emergency 311 call center Thursday afternoon while authorities scrambled to determine what happened on a day when President George W. Bush was in the Chicago area for a speech about homeland security.
The outage lasted about an hour. Ron Huberman, director of the city's Office of Emergency Communications, said no calls were missed.
Huberman said a mechanical failure overheated a switch that should have automatically flipped to backup power.
The public was told to continue dialing 911 to report emergencies. The high-tech $217 million communications center receives about 18,000 calls a day.
Commonwealth Edison said the outage was not caused by Wednesday's rainstorm that blacked out more than 200,000 customers on the South Side and in the southwest suburbs.
