OKLAHOMA CITY -- Officials released more details Tuesday about why it took seven hours for crews to fix Oklahoma City's 911 system Monday night.

Eyewitness News 5 was the first television station to report an outage in the system, which happened at about 6 p.m. Monday. A contractor hired by Cox Communications severed a main phone line in northeast Oklahoma City, which cut off regular 911 services, officials said.

Although the city's 911 system was once again operating on Tuesday, the memory of a busy signal was still fresh in the minds of many metro residents. For more than an hour on Monday night, dispatchers were unable to receive calls because of the severed line.

While crews spent hours piecing together hundreds of lines that formed the main cable, city officials were scrambling to get a backup plan together for emergency service. Because the city does not have a redundant 911 line that can be used in a crisis situation, local phone companies had to spend more than an hour isolating the problem while city technicians re-routed calls to backup numbers.

Despite the length of time it took to get a backup plan in place, Oklahoma City police spokesman Capt. Jeffrey Becker said he believes city officials did an admirable job.

"First-responders (are) used to dealing with obstacles," Becker said. "That was an obstacle we had to overcome, and we did it last night.

"We reverted back to the way we used to take information, and we processed the calls. We reassigned dispatchers and dispatched calls from headquarters and briefing stations."

But now that the obstacle is gone, Cox Communications officials are trying to figure out how it was created.

Company spokeswoman Kym Koch said a preliminary investigation involving Cox, SBC and the contractor shows that the contractor was following the instructions he was given.

"There were markings at site, and that contractor was following the guidelines of Call Okie and those markings -- digging two feet on either side of those lines," Koch said. "He was following procedures based on how the site was marked at that time."

Becker said service is now back to normal. He said he is not aware of any emergency situations that are adversely affected by the temporary outage.

"I'm not aware of any serious problems that are a consequence of us having limitations on our ability to get information last night," he said. "The bottom line is, it's entirely possible there were delays in us processing information."

All of the parties involved in the outage were still investigating Tuesday evening. Several people close to the investigation told Eyewitness News 5 that the contracting firm could be billed for the cost of repairs -- as well as any overtime that was spent on repairs -- if it is found to be at fault.