Update – 11:57 PM: Via PEMA – At this time, 911 services have been restored in Pennsylvania. An investigation into what caused intermittent outages will continue, and we will update you on that as soon as we can. We worked with counties to fully test that the system is operational. Please do not call 911 for testing purpose; leave lines open for true emergencies. Thank you to our staff, county 911 offices, and tech experts for working late into the night to restore this critical emergency service to its full capacity.
Original Post: The County of Berks is among an unknown numbers of counties and municipalities in Pennsylvania that is currently experiencing an intermittent failure/outage of the 9-1-1 emergency call system.
The technical providers for 9-1-1 delivery for the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) are engaged and investigating this issue; however, there is no know cause at this time.
In the interim Berks County residents should continue to try to use 9-1-1 in Berks County for emergencies. If residents are unable to get through to emergency services via 9-1-1, they should call 610-655-4911 as an alternative. We have no reason to believe that the 610-655-4911 number is compromised.
Most importantly, people should not call 9-1-1 to “test the situation”. Calls to 9-1-1 that are not legitimate emergencies might compound the situation.