911 is, as they say, a joke.
Or at least it was last night for a couple hours, when the emergency call system went off the air in Baltimore around 8 PM. According to the Sun, the problem was that calls were being automatically re-routed to a back-up call center… but nobody was there. While Verizon worked on fixing the problem, callers with emergencies were told to call 311, the city’s service request line, instead. City police took to the streets “in a very visible way” so people could approach them directly.
A little after 10 PM, Verizon managed to fix the problem without the city devolving into a scene from The Purge.
