Fond du Lac County dispatchers help neighboring Dodge County when phone lines fail

The Fond du Lac County Communications Center took on more calls than usual Thursday, August 13, 2026, as they assisted Dodge County, after their phone system went down.

According to a Facebook post by the Dodge County Sheriff’s Office, Both 911 lines and police radio communications went down for a short time Thursday evening around 7 p.m.

While those issues were fixed after a short time, the non emergency phone lines ceased to work for several hours causing the communications center to issue a different phone number for non emergency calls.

Fond du Lac County dispatchers were heard giving Dodge County dispatchers some calls in the Dodge County area during the outage, as emergency telecommunications systems use pre-planned failover protocols to automatically reroute incoming calls to neighboring county dispatch centers should those lines go down.

This means when a person in Dodge County called 911 during the outage, the call was sent to surrounding call centers like Fond du Lac County.

The Dodge County Sheriff’s Office Facebook page stated all lines were restored by 10:50 p.m.