Lake County’s newest and largest consolidated emergency dispatch center – LakeComm – experienced an outage that impacted 911 lines for about an hour on Thursday afternoon, causing delays in emergency response.
The Lake Consolidated Emergency Communications Center (LakeComm), located in Libertyville, began experiencing a 911 outage at around 3:40 p.m. on Thursday.
All 911 calls into LakeComm – including non-emergency phone calls – were reportedly affected.
Instead, the Northwest Central Dispatch System (NWCDS) in Arlington Heights handled 911 calls from much of Lake County while LakeComm was down.
NWCDS notified LakeComm dispatchers of emergency calls over the radio on the Interagency Fire Emergency Radio Network (IFERN) and other radio talk groups, allowing LakeComm to dispatch first responders to calls, albeit at a delay.
The outage lasted until around 4:30 p.m., but it appears LakeComm continued to have intermittent issues until around 5 p.m.
Lake & McHenry County Scanner is working to confirm whether the Waukegan 911 Dispatch Center – which dispatches for Waukegan Police and Fire, Park City Police, Tower Lakes Police and Winthrop Harbor Police and Fire – also experienced an outage.
It appears all other dispatch centers in Lake County and the surrounding area remained operational.
It is currently unknown what exactly caused the outage.
LakeComm began operating in November 2025 when seven dispatch centers in the county consolidated into LakeComm.
In total, LakeComm provides police and fire/rescue dispatching for 30 agencies in the county.
Much of Lake County is covered by LakeComm, although some municipalities – like Waukegan – use other dispatch centers.
Lake & McHenry County Scanner has reached out to LakeComm Executive Director Jason Kern for information on the outage, but we have not yet heard back.