Some residents of Northeast Texas experienced a disruption in 9-1-1 services early this morning, but services have since been restored, emergency management officials said.
Rockwall County Office of Emergency Management office reported at 5:40 a.m. on December 26 that 9-1-1 services in Rockwall County were down. Citizens in need of emergency services requiring the police, firefighters, or EMS in Heath, Fate, and Rockwall were advised to call 972-771-7724, while those in unincorporated areas or citizens of Mclendon-Chisholm, Royse City, and Mobile City were advised to call 972-204-7002.
During the outage, 9-1-1 services remained available through text messaging. The office issued another update at 8:40 a.m. stating that the cities of Kaufman, Forney, and Terrell in Kaufman County were also affected by the outage.
“We have alerted the county using a Wireless Emergency Alert that said “911 service down in Rockwall County. You can still text 911 in an emergency.” We apologize for the abbreviated message, when sending a WEA we can only send a very short message,” said the office in its post on Facebook.
County officials contacted NCT911, the organization that provides 9-1-1 service to the county, to remedy the issue.
The office reported hours later at 9:40 a.m. that 9-1-1 service had been restored to Rockwell County as well as the aforementioned cities in Kaufman County. Officials have not stated the cause of the outage, but more information is expected to be revealed as it becomes available.
