Sprint Restores 911 Service Wednesday Morning

UPDATED at 8:29 a.m. Wednesday ROCKVILLE, MD — A Sprint cellular service outage that struck the Washington, DC, area including Montgomery County, has been fixed, restoring callers' access to 911 service, according to an alert sent by the company.

A message from Montgomery County emergency officials on Tuesday afternoon said that Sprint users may receive a busy signal if they tried to call 911, and therefore they should use either a landline phone or a cell phone from another provider. About 6:30 a.m. Wednesday county officials said service had been restored to Sprint users.

During the outage, 9-1-1 service could not be reached by text messaging.

In an email to Patch.com, a Sprint spokesperson wrote Tuesday: "Due to an extensive commercial power outage and fire, some Sprint wireline customers in the Metro DC Area are unable to access voice and data service. We are working aggressively to restore power and full services, and we apologize for the inconvenience to our customers."

Representatives from both Dominion Power in Northern Virginia and Pepco in Washington, D.C. said they were not aware of any power outages that caused the Sprint problems or anyone with Sprint getting in touch with their companies about the problem.

A Sprint spokeswoman told Patch a fire occurred in DC across the street from the company's DC Switch site, which caused a loss of power and generator failure at the location.

Montgomery County Council member Roger Berliner told the Montgomery County Sentinel that "... clearly, we’re going to need to call these people [Sprint] in so we can have an understanding as to what happened and why and it’s just… what can you say? As one of my colleagues said, this is people’s worst nightmare.”

Berliner serves as the chairman of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments.

Sprint users in Prince George's County, along with Arlington and Fairfax counties in Virginia, were also part of the outage.

In July, two people died during a two-hour span when Montgomery County’s entire 911 system was down after an air conditioning unit failed and the system shut down to prevent overheating. An investigation into the outage and what impact it may have had on the county’s response times -- and to the two deaths -- as ordered by County Executive Ike Leggett is under way.

Family members of a Rockville man with breathing problems say they dialed 911 for an hour without success before calling the local fire station to seek help for their struggling father. Marlon Somarriba, 40, from Rockville, died July 10 at his home. A 91-year-old Olney woman also died during the emergency system outage.

— Patch editors Mary Ann Barton and Dan Taylor contributed to this report.
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