Courtney Mabeus, The Examiner
2007-12-18 08:00:00.0
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Montgomery County -

After Verizon owned up to its responsibility for the second major failure of the Montgomery County 911 system in less than three months, local officials aren’t satisfied with the way the phone company has handled the outages.

A Verizon spokeswoman said a circuit connecting 911 calls to the county’s primary emergency operations center in Gaithersburg failed. That, coupled with a software problem, caused a two-hour service blackout Sunday afternoon.

Verizon repaired the circuit and corrected the software problem, which prevented the Gaithersburg operations center from switching over to a backup office in Rockville, company spokeswoman Christy Reap said Monday.

But Councilman Phil Andrews, who chairs Montgomery’s public safety committee, said he has concerns even beyond the reliability of the system.

“It didn’t seem that it was noticed,” Andrews said. “What I’ve heard was the way it was picked up, people [at the county 911 center] noticed there weren’t any calls coming for a long time. There needs to be a signal that alerts the call takers immediately when the system goes down.”

County police and emergency service officials said no major incidents occurred during Sunday’s 10:40 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. outage. Callers on cell phones were able to get through, but emergency workers said callers from land lines were frozen out.

Reap said it would be up to the county to provide an alarm that alerts employees of a system failure.

A similar, though much shorter, outage occurred on Sept. 22, when a problem with Verizon’s equipment caused a nine-minute blackout until 911 calls could be rerouted. There were no major incidents during that outage. Last year the center handled 274 calls on an average day.

Officials said had the outage occurred later in the day Sunday, it could have been disastrous. Strong afternoon winds, which gusted up to 40 miles per hour, caused power lines to break and other problems in the early evening that caused about 75 percent of the county’s Fire and Rescue Service to be activated, spokesman Pete Piringer said.

Reap said the company is continuing to investigate the outage to prevent future problems.

“There was an alarm, and Verizon responded to it,” Reap said. “It sets in motion a whole series of technical investigation and response.”

cmabeus@dcexaminer.com