Estimated read time: Less than a minute
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) — Montgomery County officials plan to investigate why the 911 system failed for two hours, during which time two people died.
Officials said in a statement Monday that the 911 system was out from about 11:10 p.m. Sunday and 1:10 a.m. Monday. Callers received only a busy signal.
During the outage, crews responded to two medical emergency calls, involving fatalities that included a 91-year-old Olney woman and 40-year-old Marlon Somarriba from Rockville. It's unclear if the outage was involved.
Somarriba's family members tell WRC-TV (http://bit.ly/29MdxKi) that they dialed 911 repeatedly for over an hour before finally calling the Rockville police directly. An ambulance was then dispatched.
County Executive Ike Leggett says he's calling for an immediate investigation into the outage.
County chief spokesman Patrick Lacefield says the 911 outage was traced to a malfunctioning heating, ventilation and air conditioning system that caused both the main power system and backup system to shut down.
Copyright © The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
