The Montgomery County Council next week will hold a special work session on the 911 system outage earlier this month that officials believe was caused by a malfunctioning air conditioning unit.
The outage ran from 11:10 p.m. July 10 to 1:09 a.m. July 11, causing the center to miss some 911 calls. Emergency crews responded to two fatal incidents, one involving a 91-year-old Olney woman and one involving a 40-year-old Rockville man, during the outage.
Family members of Luis Somarriba, the Rockville man who had died by the time a medic showed up to his house, told news outlets they repeatedly tried to call 911 and continued to get a busy signal for about an hour before calling City of Rockville police.
According to a council press release, the work session set for 10:45 a.m. Tuesday is for council members “to learn the facts behind the unavailability of the county’s 911 emergency call system, and its non-emergency public safety line.”
On July 11, county spokesperson Patrick Lacefield said the air conditioning unit in the IT room of the Alternate Emergency Communications Center (AECC) in Rockville froze up, causing the building’s 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. The county was using the AECC, which had been activated about three weeks prior to the outage, to allow hardware changes to be made at the regular Emergency Communications Center in Gaithersburg, Lacefield said.
The air conditioning unit was installed at the AECC building in 1994 and had shown no signs of dysfunction since then, according to Lacefield.
At a July 18 meeting of the Western Montgomery County Citizens Advisory Board, council member Marc Elrich said he expects council members to support whatever improvements need to be made to ensure a similar situation doesn’t happen again.
“It’s just absolutely unacceptable what happened,” Elrich told the group of residents and business representatives. “I think we will deal with that.”
