Montgomery County Council members Thursday openly questioned the ability of the county to notify residents in emergency situations, despite years of training, practice and the existence of an Emergency Operations Center with a roughly $2 million annual budget.
Confusion reigned throughout a three-day period last week when thousands of residents living north of the Beltway were required to boil water for drinking, cooking and washing the dishes and about 1,000 restaurants and food vendors were closed after a four-foot water main burst the evening of Sunday, June 16.
There was a three-hour delay between the time water utility officials announced a boil water advisory and when information was posted on the county’s Web site.
“Since September 11th, 2001, this county has been working to ensure the 1 million people in it have an emergency response system,” Council President Mike Knapp said. “I’ve seen the system work three or four times. I’m not sure I’ve seen it used effectively during this administration.”
Last December, Montgomery County’s 911 system was partially down for two and a half hours before officials acted to notify the public. County spokesmen said they used news releases and a text message alert system to convey the problems, but chose not to interrupt television programming with emergency announcements.
Although Montgomery County officials sent out 126 text message alerts over the past 30 days, the notification system, which serves only 14,000 of the 1 million county residents, was not used to notify residents last week of the boil water advisory.
“I am extremely well-informed about when we’re going to have a thunderstorm, periodically informed of a roadway problem, and apparently I am only informed of other things when someone has made a call based on undefined standards that I should be informed,” Councilwoman Nancy Floreen said.
Several senior officials from County Executive Ike Leggett’s office said they handled certain elements of the emergency well — like ensuring there was water available to put out fires and use at hospitals — and acknowledged other aspects — such as notifying the public through Web postings and text alerts — could have been handled better.
“To a certain extent, I think a degree of confusion is a given since this was the first boil water advisory in 90 years,” Leggett’s spokesman Patrick Lacefield said.
There were no reports of illness associated with the water outages.
“I think we dodged a bullet,” Knapp said.
