Janice Carpio, KFOX News at Nine

KFOX was the first to report the phone problems at the new 911 center in February, but the center's first severe storm proved the problems may be far behind.

"We had quite a few flooding calls and traffic hazards -- those types of calls -- which are weather related," said Chris Celaya, El Paso's chief of communications. It was the biggest challenge the new 911 center has faced since its relocation.

Thursday's severe weather flooded streets and trapped people in their homes and cars. Dispatchers were swamped with calls.

"We did handle a very large amount of calls, which is expected during these types of events, so we had about a 300 percent increase of phone calls over the night before, which is pretty extensive," said Celaya.

On average, the 911 center receives about 60 calls between the hours of 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. On Thursday night, it received 238. As KFOX reported in February, phone calls were not getting through to emergency dispatchers. The problems began when they first moved to the new building.

"We initially had some problems. Those things were addressed; we fixed those problems and made sure the phone system was working the way it's supposed to. It did work yesterday," said Celaya.

"We've provided a more secure network. As the network has grown, we've been able to grow with it and strengthen our network through the changes that have been made," said Ryan Stirpe, spokesman for AT&T West Texas.

No dropped calls were officially noted, but if there were, officials guarantee the problem may be coming through different sources like cell phones. "You are going to have those circumstances where you hit between a cell tower and you have dead spots, so those things do happen, but we didn't have any reports that we had problems," said Celaya. "AT&T's network is designed to manage high call volumes, so no real special provisions are required to accommodate calls generated by severe weather."

An estimated 100 calls were weather-related. Fifty-seven calls were because of water hazards, 33 were because of flooding, six were single-response fires and three were multi-unit fires caused by the storms.