Friday, July 15, 2016

Montgomery County Council to hold session on 911 system failure July 28

The Montgomery County Council's Public Safety Committee will hold a "special worksession" to receive preliminary findings on this week's catastrophic 911 system failure. Two residents seeking fire and rescue assistance died during the outage. Media accounts suggest those fatalities were a result of the inability to reach 911 operators.

ABC7 reporter Kevin Lewis asked the daughter-in-law of Ting Ting Co if she thought her husband's mother would still be here today if the County's 911 system had been operational Sunday night. "I think so, I think so," replied June Cheung of Brookville, who was a caretaker for Co.

The session will be held at 9:00 AM on Thursday, July 28, in the 3rd floor conference room of the County Council Building, located at 100 Maryland Avenue in Rockville. Hopefully the discussion will explore failure of the Alert Montgomery system during the outage, as well. Text alerts were not sent out to subscribers until 16 minutes after the outage had ended early Monday morning. I am still the only reporter to raise the Alert Montgomery failure issue.

Of course, the tables should be turned at some point to ask the Council why they failed to ensure the 911 system had adequate back-up, especially knowing that there was only one level of backup! Did you know these clowns gave themselves a 28% raise, and that you - the taxpayer - will be paying each councilmember $136,258 each next year?

We're definitely not getting our money's worth.

2 comments:

  1. "ask the Council why they failed to ensure the 911 system had adequate back-up"

    Do you honestly think County Councilmembers get involved in that level of minutia that they're literally going around checking how many levels of backup a technical system has?

    That's as absurd as trying to blame the outage on you, personally. Robert, you were a candidate for County Council and you never brought up the need to have ever more redundancies?! Shame on you. You should have known better. See? Dumb.

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    1. If they're smart, they do. In fact, I repeatedly brought up the need for the Council to start addressing the failure to deliver the most basic functions of government when I ran for office. They've been in office almost 20 years in many cases. We found out the government is running on Windows 2000(!) in 2014. You mean, they never in all that time reviewed 911 backup? "See? Dumb."

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