Updated 4:30 p.m., Monday – Montgomery County’s 911 system went down for about two hours late Sunday night and into early Monday morning as the result of a malfunctioning air conditioner followed by a series of electrical power failures, according to county spokesman Patrick Lacefield.
The outage ran from 11:10 p.m. Sunday to 1:09 a.m. Monday, Lacefield said, causing the center to miss some 911 calls. In a press release sent out Monday afternoon, the county said emergency crews responded to two fatal incidents—one involving a 91-year-old Olney woman and the second a 40-year-old Twinbrook man—during the outage. Callers during the outage were met with a busy signal, rather than a person, according to the county.
Lacefield said the air conditioning unit for the 911 system froze up, causing the backup power system to go into “bypass mode” and switch to power provided by electrical lines running from the street to the building. The switchover created a power surge that flipped the main breakers for the system, which shut off the power. At the time the county was using the Alternate Emergency Communications Center in Rockville, which had been activated about three weeks ago to allow hardware changes to be made at the Emergency Communications Center in Gaithersburg, the county said.
The air conditioning unit was installed at the building in 1994 and showed no signs of dysfunction since then, according to Lacefield.
In the afternoon press release, County Executive Ike Leggett said the outages would be investigated.
"I am calling for an immediate investigation into the outage and what impact it may have had on the county response times to emergencies–as well as any consequences," Leggett said. "I also want a thorough evaluation of the systems that support 911 to make sure that the systems have the stability to withstand whatever power surges or blips that could cascade into even a partial system outage. County residents must be able to count on a prompt response to emergencies."
Lacefield said the 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. hours are the slowest two-hour stretch for 911 calls, on average, and are typically even slower times during the summer. He said the system receives an average of 650 dispatches per day, with about one in every eight of those calls classified as a high priority.
In response to the outage, the county sent out an AlertMontgomery email asking residents to call their local district police stations in the event of an emergency. Lacefield said he also called in county 311 operators to have that system operating during and after the outage.
The air conditioning unit’s condensing fan will have to be replaced before the backup power to the emergency communications system can be restored, according to Lacefield.
