An equipment breakdown blacked out emergency services in Washington, D.C., Saturday night, leaving residents unable to dial 911.
The outage lasted for 90 minutes from 11:30 p.m. to 1:15 a.m. EST, after power sources to the 911 call center all went dead. Two phone lines were established to contact either the Metropolitan Police Department or D.C. Fire and EMS, however officials said they only received 40 calls on both lines during the outage. Officials said over the time span of the outage, the department normally receives between 300 and 350 911 calls, reports The Washington Post.
The police do not have an accurate count of how many emergency calls were missed while 911 services were down, and it is likely callers experienced delays after officials restored power. Mayor Muriel Bowser encouraged people on Twitter at 2 a.m., after officials restored service, to remain on the line so they would stay in the queue for service.
“We know exactly what happened,” said Chris Geldart, director of the D.C. Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency, according to The Washington Post. “But we don’t know exactly why that happened to our system. We are able to rule out the possibility of nefarious activities or some kind of hack into our system.”
Power running to the facility from the local utility provider Pepco is not the source of the outage, according to officials, and ran effectively all night. The boxes routing power to the 911 facility all went out at once, for reasons that are still unclear, reports NBC Washington.
Officials are investigating what caused all the power boxes to fail, and noted Sunday at a press conference it is an unusual circumstance. Officials will also continue to investigate how many residents were affected by the breakdown in emergency services.
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