April 12th, 2024 by WCBC Radio

Tense moments Thursday afternoon at the Allegany County Emergency Operations center. Just after 2PM a piece of Motorola equipment malfunctioned preventing 911 calls to be answered by dispatchers. Firefighters in their stations and other emergency staff stood watch on their phone line at their facilities while city and county officials work to reroute phone lines to the Garrett County 911 center. No emergency calls were lost during the system outage and emergency response personnel were dispatched to area emergencies during the two-hour outage. Steve Sharpley, County 911 Manager said "Our staff acted accordingly and swiftly to put our backup plan in place and we are not aware of any 911 calls that were dropped in the time it took for the calls to be rerouted to Garrett County".