Montgomery County owns a “reverse 911” system capable of quickly calling thousands of residents during emergencies, but officials can only confirm having used it once: To tell polling places to stay open an extra hour during February’s primaries.
Montgomery Council President Mike Knapp criticized the county’s emergency management leaders for not using the Reverse 911 system after a recent water main break required notifying tens of thousands of residents to boil water before use. Montgomery County Homeland Security Director Gordon Aoyagi said the county has had a Reverse 911 calling system for the past four to six months, but it’s tough to isolate calls to large affected areas during crisis situations, and using the system would have cost Montgomery $200,000 to $300,000.
“In the San Diego wildfires, they used reverse 911 to call people by ZIP codes and evacuate them,” Knapp said. “We’ve got a $4.3 billion budget … and our residents, I think, would like us to make that call to alert them to something that could affect their health, even if it’s a little bit costly.”
Both Aoyagi and Patrick Lacefield, spokesman for County Executive Ike Leggett, told reporters that county police had been using the technology, but police spokeswoman Lucille Baur said she was not aware that police had ever used it.
Margie Roher, spokeswoman for Montgomery’s board of elections, said the county had used it to direct precincts to keep their doors open an extra hour when winter storms raged during February primaries.
After two days of phone calls, no one in county government could tell The Examiner how much the county had spent to purchase the equipment or how often it had been used. Other reporters were told last week by county officials that Montgomery’s government did not even own the technology, only the school system did.
Fairfax has used its Reverse 911 system six times in the past two years for events ranging from a water main break to flood warnings, Fairfax County spokeswoman Merni Fitzgerald said. “We have developed maps in areas where dams could possibly break,” Fairfax emergency watch officer Robert Turner said. “We have a message basically in the system so if something happens, the message is basically there and we can just click on it and get things out quickly.”
