Montgomery County’s 911 system was partially down for two hours last month before officials made the decision to notify the public, County Council members heard Tuesday.
Verizon, police and county spokespeople said that confusion about why some calls were coming into the center while others were not, coupled with uncertainty about how much of the county was affected by the problem, resulted in the delay.
“We try to err on the side of not sending out things unnecessarily,” county spokeswoman Donna Bigler said.
During the three-hour service interruption, Montgomery emergency management officials used a press release and a text-message emergency alert system that serves about 11,500 of the county’s nearly one million residents.
Those alerts were sent out about two and a half hours into the outage.
County emergency management officials said they opted not to use an emergency alert system that would have interrupted television programming.
“Because it wasn’t a complete outage, we didn’t know what to tell the public,” Bill Ferretti, deputy director of the Montgomery County 911 Emergency Communications Center, said. “We didn’t want to direct the public away from 911, because some calls were getting through.”
Verizon and police officials said Tuesday they had changed their policies for dealing with 911 system problems.
Verizon spokeswoman Christy Reap said Verizon staff will now notify county call center personnel the second they notice a call backup system is in use, to alert them to potential problems. During the service problems last month, there was a 22-minute delay.
Ferretti said 911 call center staff are now testing backup call lines for problems once a week, whereas the tests were previously only conducted about once a quarter. In addition police officials have asked the National Emergency Numbers Association to review Montgomery’s 911 system.
The county is not considering a new 911 call system provider, however.
“Verizon is the main phone company here in Maryland,” Ferretti said. “They own the entire infrastructure to provide our on-site 911 systems.”
More information
To sign up for Montgomery County’s emergency text-alert program go to:
» https://alert.montgomerycountymd.gov/index.
