9-11 went down on Friday, but is back up now

Vermont's 9-11 emergency phone service went offline this past Friday afternoon and evening.

During the 5.75 hour partial outage, 45 people attempted calls to 911, according to data from FairPoint.
...It is not clear whether any individuals in emergencies were affected by the blocked calls.

What happened?  According to FairPoint,

"this outage was caused by a rare occurrence of the winter storm and a hardware failure, which impacted callers in the State of Vermont unable to place calls, including calls to 911. "

They fixed it quickly:

"Temporary re-routes were made [Friday] night, allowing for interim service; followed by permanent re-routes allowing for full restoration last night. The network in Vermont is working well now and has been since last night as of 8:45 PM.”

What do you do when 911 doesn't work?

(photo by Derek Kaczmarczyk)