By Leah Fabel, The Washington Examiner
Original publication date: Feb. 20

Fairfax County, Va. — A variety of Verizon network and equipment failures have disrupted 911 emergency call service in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, leading to demands for investigations and an upgrade from local and federal officials.

The most recent breakdown occurred Friday [Feb. 18] in Fairfax and Arlington counties, where a Verizon equipment failure caused some 911 calls from cell phones to be met with a busy signal or no sound at all, according to county officials. Service was interrupted beginning at about 9:00 a.m. until 1:30 p.m. in Arlington, and until about 5:45 p.m. in Fairfax. Calls from landlines were not affected.

Fairfax spokesman Jim Person said that overall call volume was not affected, and that to his knowledge no major disasters went untended.

Northern Virginias problems came on the heels of major service blunders in Montgomery and Prince Georges that attracted the attention of watchdogs as high up as the Federal Communications Commission.

Over a five hour period during and following the Jan. 26 snowstorm that wreacked havoc on D.C. area residents and roadways, the commission found that all 14 circuits in the Verizon network that route Montgomerys wireless calls failed, and that nine of 10 circuits failed in Prince Georges. As a result, about 10,000 calls to 911 were blocked.

Any 911 call which is not connected can have serious consequences, but the large number of missed 911 calls on Jan. 26 is alarming, wrote Rear Adm. Jamie Barnett, chief of the FCCs Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, in a Feb. 18 letter to Verizon. We are particularly concerned that this problem may be widespread across Verizons footprint.

The letter noted similar incidents in the counties in 2010, with at least one resulting in delayed medical attention for a serious condition.

Barnett called for an investigation into the problems. Montgomery County called for a similar response after the storm, but so far has received nothing, said Councilman Phil Andrews, chair of the public safety committee.

Its potentially extremely serious, and not acceptable, Andrews said. The county, along with others, needs to keep pressure on Verizon so that emergency calls are not interrupted.

Verizon spokesman Harry Mitchell said that technicians are continuing to monitor the faulty equipment that caused the Fairfax and Arlington outages. The problems in Maryland sprung from a different set of issues, he said.

We take 911 seriously, Mitchell said. We certainly work to have and indeed do have a very reliable system.

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Related Links

• “Verizon Asked to Probe ‘Alarming’ Dropped 911 Calls,” by Todd Shields, Bloomberg, Feb. 18, 2011.
• Click here to read the letter from the FCC.