Friday, July 19, 2019

Montgomery County 911 system fails again

Officials don't know how
many emergency calls went
unanswered during outage

Montgomery County's 911 system failed twice Thursday, according to the Montgomery County Police Department, which does not operate the system. An MCPD spokesperson said that County officials cannot, as of now, tell them how many urgent 911 calls went unanswered during the service interruptions, but that the department is aware of one caller in need of basic life support medical services who was affected.

Callers who dialed 911 around 8:30 AM yesterday morning - and again between 9:35 and 9:43 AM - could not get through to the 911 call center, and instead heard a message saying they number they'd reached was out of service. According to MCPD, the failure was traced to a network outage between system components.

There is no indication that the Alert Montgomery system informed citizens of either outage. Montgomery County Government has yet to post any statement regarding the outages as of this writing.
It was exactly three years ago that I broke the story of a similar 911 system failure. Later, the County tried to cover up the fact that Alert Montgomery had failed to issue alerts to subscribers until long after the outage had ended. Two people were confirmed to have died has a result of that 2016 911 system failure, 

Yet despite their failure having fatal results for two of their constituents in 2016, the County Council has clearly failed to change its ways. Here we are again, with another 911 outage three years later. Similarly, the Council failed to upgrade the public safety radio communications system for County first responders for more than a decade, deliberately kicking the can down the road to have more play money to spend on their cartel sugar daddies.

In fact, since taking the oath of office last December, the latest Council has failed to take action on a single major crisis. Not a single thing has been done to exercise oversight and update the 911 system, complete our master plan highway system, turn around our moribund economy that now ranks last in the region by every economic development benchmark, nor to address rising rates of violent crime.
Most of the current Council term has been spent on a grotesque attack on the men and women of the Montgomery County police department. The Council's continual slander, defamation and disparagement of Montgomery's finest only put our first responders and the public in greater danger. Which fits perfectly with the County Council's record of making public safety a low priority, to the point that there are actual people who have died as a result of their failure to address basic government issues like providing a functioning 911 system. It's outrageous.

2 comments:

Boyce Bowles said...

Amazing the difference a year makes.
Last Summer and Fall, it was "morning in MoCo". We were healthy, wealthy and wise as a county.

Then we took a huge swing but struck out to get Amazon. Even more painfully, they went to our neighbors in Arlington.

Then folks were elected or re-elected locally office with no debate or scrutiny from our local legacy media. Even their favorite candidate, Mrs. Floreen lost badly. An unremarkable candidate with no accomplishments.

Sitting councilmen are sounding the alarm that we're in economic crisis.

Dyer is now reporting we don't have a functional 911 system.

I wish the legacy media would start scrutinizing our government. Dyer is doing the job but the legacy print, tv and radio folks have additioy resources.

Anna said...

Thankfully, we have the integrity and credibility of a completely anonymous person using the alias Boyce Bowles to give us their (probably paid for) opinion.

11:23 AM 7/19/19