A phone outage has hit at least three northwest Iowa counties. The Emmet County Sheriff’s Office and Estherville Police Department as well as much of the area experienced telephone difficulties receiving incoming telephone calls Wednesday throughout Emmet, Palo Alto, and Pocahontas counties.
Landline telephones were affected during the span of the outage and non-emergency law enforcement phone numbers for the Emmet County Sheriff’s Office and the Estherville Police Department were only available for non-emergency calls throughout the day Wednesday and Wednesday night. The 911 calls for cell phones were being received at the Emmet County Communications Center, and were also being transferred to the Dickinson County Communications Center.
The problem was located in Palo Alto County, although there are no details on what caused the outage. Emmet, Palo Alto and Pocahontas counties all now have their phone lines up and running.
(Reporting by Nathan Puhl, KILR, Estherville)