It started at around 7 a.m. Tuesday — calls to Montgomery County, Maryland, government offices were not going through.
The outage affected, among others, the Executive Office Building and County Council Building in Rockville, along with the police headquarters in Gaithersburg.
By around 11:30 a.m., county government employees got a message explaining the outage was expected to be fixed in a few hours. But the problem continued.
Callers dialing the county extensions of 777 or 773 got either a ring tone or a message telling them in English and Spanish, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed”.
According to Ohene Gyapong, the deputy director of the county’s Public Information Office, the problem was caused by a leak from a storm drain that sent water into a phone closet at the Executive Office Building on the Terrace level.
“This caused a failure of the devices that connect our phone system to our phone provider.”
Gyapong said 311 and 911 services were not affected by the outage. Phone service was back by around 6:30 p.m., according to an email sent from the county’s IT department.
The phone glitch happened on the first day on the job for County Executive Marc Elrich’s new communications director, Barry Hudson. Hudson had only just gotten his telephone extension assigned when the outage hit.
“Welcome to Montgomery County!” joked Gyapong.
There was a separate, unrelated problem with the county’s emergency services radio communications system.
Spokesman for the Montgomery County Fire and Rescue Service Pete Piringer tweeted out that the emergency system was in a “Code Red” mode due to an “internal technical issue” Tuesday.
Nonemergency communications were limited and a “Blue Alert” was also in effect, meaning that EMS units would transport patients to the nearest hospital. Service was back to normal by 3:30 p.m. according to a subsequent tweet from Piringer.
On June 18, the Montgomery County Council committees on Government Operations and Public Safety will be holding a joint session to discuss issues with the county’s emergency services radio communications system.
