Light Transport; Low Wing; 2 Turbojet Eng
Air Traffic Control Fully Certified
Air Traffic Control Time Certified In Pos 1 (yrs) 3
Confusion; Distraction
ATC Issue All Types; Conflict Airborne Conflict; Deviation / Discrepancy - Procedural Published Material / Policy
General None Reported / Taken
ZZZ1 went ATC zero due to a COVID cleaning around Xpm local for several hours. We had one non-radar route going north bound from my area to ZZZ2 Center. My area does not train or use non-radar procedures so we were very unprepared in terms of skill. We were told to get an estimate for the ZZZZZ Intersection from the aircraft and provide 10 minutes in trail between aircraft at similar altitudes. We were initially given 20 miles in trail from approach controls; but this quickly over loaded the sector and it was increased to 30 miles in trail which was insufficient.Things that went wrong:1) Printer at the XY position broke at the beginning; but was fixed by tech-ops in a somewhat timely manner.2) The automatic printing was not turned on for the XY position and no one knew how to turn it on.3) Manual printing the strips took up a lot of time for XY position.4) We did not have enough strip holders to post all of the strips for the aircraft in our airspace.5) The ZZZZZ Intersection sounds a lot like the ZZZZZ1 Intersection so we got a lot of incorrect time estimates as pilots got the confused.6) A lot of aircraft were still climbing before getting to the ZZZZZ Intersection to being the non-radar routing so they gave us incorrect time estimates for ZZZZZ1. Once some of these aircraft leveled off their estimates were changing drastically.7) Once we got the time estimate from the aircraft our Supervisor had to go and call on the area land-line. So we had no easy way to communicate with ZZZ2 Center.8) The XZ position was also open and 'merging' aircraft into the north bound rooting but did not have a d-side and given the strong westerly winds was getting odd ZZZZZ1 estimates.9) The combined amount of overflight traffic and departure traffic was greater than the number of available altitudes. We had 9 usable altitudes but often had 11+ aircraft per 10 minute period.I would very strongly recommend that the non-radar north bound route not be used again unless it's late into the night when there is very little traffic. If it is necessary for it to be use then only two or three major airports be allowed to depart aircraft and they would only be allowed to depart one aircraft every 10 minutes per airport.
Center Controller reported a possible loss of separation and having difficulties to attain the required non-RADAR separation due to another Center going ATC zero for COVID-19 cleaning.