911 SYSTEM SUFFERS PARTIAL BREAKDOWN.

Byline: Daily News

Los Angeles' emergency 911 system suffered a partial crash Saturday afternoon, causing individual police stations to respond to calls rather than the city's central dispatchers, officials said.

The outage was caused when a fire in a City Hall East parking garage at 2:50 p.m. activated the sprinkler system, which ended up flooding the police communications equipment room, according to officials at the Los Angeles Police Department.

All 911 calls were immediately switched to the stations and there was no interruption in 911 service, police said. The repair was expected to be completed by this morning, said Officer Don Cox, a spokesman for the LAPD.

``This wasn't a total crash like before,'' said Lt. Mike Schneider at the LAPD's Devonshire Division, where three extra dispatchers were working Saturday night to handle calls. The dispatchers were still able to use their computers, unlike the crash in December when the system was down for 1-1/2 hours.

On Dec. 30, there was a malfunction of a Pacific Bell electrical component that connects the LAPD's central dispatch system to the 911 network. In that case, emergency calls were forwarded to all but two LAPD stations.

One thing that didn't change Saturday was problems with callers using 911 for nonemergencies, asking for information such as their grandmother's phone number, Schneider said.

A full 80 percent of calls to the city's 911 lines are nonemergencies, police officials have said.

Last month, LAPD Chief Bernard C. Parks asked the City Council for $415,000 to create a citywide nonemergency number.