City of Baltimore - File #: 16-0308R

• File #: 16-0308R
• Version: 0
• Name: Investigative Hearing - 911 Outage
• Type: City Council Resolution
• Status: Failed - End of Term
• File created: 6/23/2016
• In control: Judiciary and Legislative Investigations
• Final action: 12/5/2016
• Title: Investigative Hearing - 911 Outage For the purpose of calling on representatives from Verizon and the agencies involved in the operation of Baltimore’s 911 system to appear before the City Council to discuss why the 911 system failed for 2 hours on June 14th, 2016, how they intend to prevent similar incidents in the future, and how the City’s emergency services can continue to keep Baltimore safe in the event of any future failures in the 911 system.
• Sponsors: President Young, Robert Curran, Brandon M. Scott, Bill Henry, Helen L. Holton, Warren Branch
• Indexes: 911, Investigative Hearing, Outages

Date	Ver.	Action By	Action	Result
6/27/2016	0	The City Council	Refer to Fire Department
6/27/2016	0	The City Council	Refer to Mayor's Office of Information Technology
6/27/2016	0	The City Council	Refer to Mayor's Office of Emergency Management
6/27/2016	0	The City Council	Refer to Police Department
6/23/2016	0	City Council	Assigned
6/23/2016	0	City Council	Introduced

Introduced by: President Young



A Resolution Entitled

A Council Resolution concerning
title
Investigative Hearing - 911 Outage
For the purpose of calling on representatives from Verizon and the agencies involved in the operation of Baltimore’s 911 system to appear before the City Council to discuss why the 911 system failed for 2 hours on June 14th, 2016, how they intend to prevent similar incidents in the future, and how the City’s emergency services can continue to keep Baltimore safe in the event of any future failures in the 911 system.
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Recitals

For roughly 2 hours on Tuesday, June 14th, all calls to the City’s 911 system were erroneously routed to an unmanned call center, leaving callers unable to reach emergency assistance. It is not yet clear how many calls were affected, but even one life needlessly endangered would be one too many.

During the outage, callers were reportedly greeted with a message saying “Baltimore City emergency center, all operators are busy. Your call will be answered in turn. Please do not hang up.” Without a working 911 system, these Baltimoreans had no way of obtaining vital police protection, fire suppression, or medical care, and had no way of knowing that they were not in fact close to obtaining the assistance that they desperately needed.

This is, unfortunately, not an entirely isolated incident, but instead comes amidst other recent problems with the 911 system. After years of confidence in the 911 system, citizens throughout the City have recently and increasingly complained that 911 is no longer the “fail-proof” system they had believed in for so long. This is a significant and inexcusable failure in our public safety system which must be urgently and effectively addressed.

It’s vital that the public and the Council be fully apprised of what went wrong...