For Immediate Release: Thursday, July 14, 2016
Montgomery Council’s Public Safety Committee
to hold special worksession on
outage of County’s 911 emergency system
Committee Chair Marc Elrich said special session on
Thursday, July 28, will seek details about unavailability
of call system for about two hours on July 10
ROCKVILLE, Md., July 14, 2016—The Montgomery County Council’s Public Safety Committee will hold a special worksession at 9 a.m. on Thursday, July 28, to learn the preliminary facts behind the unavailability of the County’s 911 emergency call system, and its non-emergency public safety line, that began late in the evening on Sunday, July 10.
The Public Safety Committee, which is chaired by Councilmember Marc Elrich and includes Councilmembers Tom Hucker and Sidney Katz, will meet in the Third Floor Conference Room of the Council Office Building at 100 Maryland Ave. in Rockville. The meeting will be televised live by County Cable Montgomery (CCM—Cable Channel 6 on Comcast and RCN, Channel 30 on Verizon) and also will be available via streaming through the Council web site at http://tinyurl.com/z9982v8 .
On Sunday, July 10, just after 11 p.m., the County’s 911 system experienced an interruption of service at the County’s Alternate Emergency Communications Center (AECC) located in Rockville. The outage caused community members who called the emergency 911 and non-emergency 301-279-8000 phone lines to receive a busy signal instead of a standard call taker response. The interruption lasted approximately two hours from 11:10 p.m. to 1:09 a.m.
“There is no service that this County provides to our residents that is more important than emergency response from our 911 system,” said Public Safety Chair Elrich. “We must quickly determine why the backup system failed on July 10 so we can ensure this never happens again. This meeting will serve as an inquiry into preliminary findings and an opportunity lay out a framework for a more in-depth analysis this fall, after completion of a full investigation.”
During the two hours of interrupted service, the Executive Branch said that alternative plans to receive and dispatch emergency calls were put into operation. Notification to the public was made through public safety social media and through the County’s Alert Montgomery emergency alert system. The public was advised to make emergency calls to 311 or to local police and fire stations, with information provided as to the numbers to call. Each fire and police district station was staffed to receive emergency calls and dispatch them. Police radios and mobile data computers located in police cruisers were fully operational and allowed communication between officers and the ability to receive dispatch information.
The Executive Branch has said that it has launched an investigation into the cause of the interruption. At this stage of the investigation, it is believed that the interruption to service occurred due to an internal equipment failure of a cooling (air conditioning) system in the IT room of the AECC, which then shut down the 911 system to prevent overheating. The AECC had been activated approximately four weeks ago to allow hardware changes to be made at the Emergency Communications Center (ECC) located in Gaithersburg.
# # # #
Release ID: 16-220