Heather Curtis
WMAL.com
WASHINGTON (WMAL) – Montgomery County residents could be in danger following two recent outages of the county’s aging emergency communications system.
Outages over Mother’s Day weekend took down three-quarters of the capacity of the radio channels the county’s first responders use to communicate with each other according to council member Hans Riemer.
Fortunately two recent outages didn’t happen at busy times, but Riemer said they would be in trouble if the system went down at a time when there were multiple incidents or one large-scale incident that required communication among a large number of units.
“It is a life or death matter,” Riemer said.
The county looked into locations to build two new towers, but outcry from neighbors prompted county executive Marc Elrich to abandon plans to build in those areas. The county’s now looking into other sites.
“There was a process that recommended those sites, it was controversial, but those were the sites that we had, and I think the county executive should have moved forward with those sites recognizing that the entire county is at stake,” Riemer said.
Riemer hopes a solution can be figured out that doesn’t delay building the towers, but he doesn’t think that will happen.
Riemer and councilmember Sidney Katz wrote to Elrich nearly two months ago urging him to move forward building the new towers on the first two sites that were recommended, but he said they haven’t heard back.
Elrich was not able to speak to WMAL by the deadline for this story.
A council committee will discuss fixing the system at meeting June 18.
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