FCC Wants 911 Answers From Verizon

FCC Public Safety & Homeland Security bureau Chief James Barnett Jr. wrote a strongly worded letter to Verizon Thursday asking why the communications company failed to connect roughly 10,000 911 calls in the D.C. region during the Jan. 26 snowstorm. 

"I know that you will agree that any 911 call which is not connected can have serious consequences, but the large number of missed 911 calls on January 26 is truly alarming," said Barnett in the letter.

One day after the letter was released, a new Verizon equipment failure in Fairfax may have prevented 911 calls in Arlington and Fairfax from getting through to the appropriate call centers. Arlington authorities sent out alerts providing an alternate, 10-digit number to call in case of emergencies before the problem was resolved. Verizon claims that this issue was unrelated to last month's snowstorm problems.

In those Jan. 26 cases, Verizon failed to notify 911 call centers of the outages, according to the FCC. Instead, the Montgomery and Prince George's County centers only became aware of the problems when they received complaints from residents or other call centers. Patch received of one Silver Spring resident who said he tried for hours to reach 911 as a downed power line set his yard on fire. 

The FCC has requested a meeting with Verizon officials, concerned that the same problems could occur elsewhere within their system. A call to Verizon's Mid-Atlantic regional bureau yielded a press release stating that the matter was under investigation. 

In November, the FCC used Arlington's high tech call center plans for a "next generation" 911 service that employs cell phone texts, pictures and videos.