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Fairfield Police: Reports Of 911 Calls During Cable Outage Exaggerated

FAIRFIELD, Conn. – Some Connecticut residents called their local police to report Sunday evening’s cable outage, but not to the extent being reported by national media, Fairfield Police Chief Gary MacNamara said Monday.

Optimum customers in southwestern Connecticut and parts of New Jersey lost cable service for a few hours Sunday night. Cablevision, which runs Optimum, said the disruption was caused by an outage at its Norwalk facility.

“Apologies for the inconvenience,” Cablevision said over social media Monday.

Fairfield Police put a notice on its Facebook page during the outage asking people to stop calling 911 to report the outage. The post has since been removed from the department’s Facebook page. The Associated Press picked up the story Monday, and it has been published at other news outlets nationwide.

Fairfield’s 911 dispatchers received just one confirmed call complaining about the disruption, Sgt. Suzanne Lussier said Monday. It is unclear how many calls came to the non-emergency line reporting the same incident, but there was not a large amount of emergency calls, MacNamara said.

"We got at least one call from an individual was very concerned,” MacNamara said. He added, "I think we understand people’s level of frustration and they often first turn to 911."

MacNamara did remind residents that 911 is for emergency situations only. Using 911 for non-emergency calls could tie up the line and delay a response to a life-threatening situation, he said.

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