Montgomery County’s 911 system was down for approximately 2 1/2 hours Sunday afternoon with callers receiving either a continuous ringing or “this phone number is no longer in service.”
Police officials said the outage occurred between 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Sunday, but as of late afternoon there were no reports of individuals who were harmed by the problems.
Officials with Verizon, which maintains the county’s 911 system, said they were investigating the incident and were not yet certain what caused the disruption in service.
“We’re still trying to figure out what happened,” Verizon spokeswoman Christy Reap said. “At this time, we don’t have a root cause of this.”
Police public information officers contacted the media Sunday to alert residents to the problem and directed people in need of assistance to call a non-emergency hotline at 301-279-8000 to receive help.
Officials said this is the second 911 service problem this year in Montgomery County. On Sept. 22, Montgomery County’s Public Safety Communications Center experienced a nine minute service disruption to its primary phone system, but a backup phone system was immediately activated.
On Sunday, the backup system did not work either.
“In the 911 system there are a lot of redundancies built into the system to prevent this from happening,” police spokesman Lt. Paul Sparks said. “We aren’t sure yet what caused this, but we will continue to work with Verizon to determine specifics.”
Montgomery Council Vice President Phil Andrews, chair of the council’s Public Safety Committee, confirmed incidents of this nature do not happen often.
“After the last incident, we had a public safety meeting that included a review of the problem,” Andrews said. “We take this very seriously.”
