911 emergency call system is repaired after storm, officials say, but questions linger Fairfax County officials knew there was a problem then, but its full scope did not become apparent until Verizon phoned the county around 9:30 a.m, said Steve Souder, the director of Fairfax County's Department of Public Safety Communications. "We much prefer to be notified much quicker," Souder said. The 911 problems in Fairfax, Prince William and Arlington counties and Manassas and other areas angered local officials and forced area residents to call non-emergency lines and even travel to fire stations by foot to get help. The storm knocked out 911 in a handful of areas beginning Friday night. Service began being restored on Saturday afternoon, but problems persisted through Tuesday. Fairfax County's emergency operation center only operated at half-capacity yesterday and some emergency calls were not being routed to the proper jurisdictions. The problems were only resolved around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday, Souder said. Souder rated Verizon's performance during the storm as "not very high" and said the carrier needed to install "more redundancy and more reliable redundancy" in its systems to ensure 911 will not go out during future storms. "911 is the most commonly known number in America," Souder said. It's absolutely imperative that the confidence in 911 not be put in doubt. Unfortunately, the phone providers did put it in doubt with this outage. He said emergency call volume increased more than 400 percent during the Friday night storm. Verizon officials said the storm caused widespread damage to its network. "The 911 network is designed, so there is really no one point of failure," said Harry J. Mitchell, a Verizon director of public relations. This was a perfect storm...It damaged a number of our facilities inside and out. That led to the 911 issue this weekend. We're going to do a full analysis of what happened...and take any action we need to take. Verizon announced Tuesday afternoon that nearly of its customers had cellphone service restored, but there were lingering problems with TV, landline and Internet service in Virginia, Maryland and The District. Mitchell said there was no timetable for when those problems might be resolved. He said the company had received three to four times its normal number of repair calls in recent days and crews were working extended shifts. Nevertheless, he said there was still a significant amount of cleanup work to do: Verizon has more than 130 downed utility poles and more than 760 downed utility lines. Verizon wasn't the only carrier to experience problems. AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile said Monday they were also working to repair storm damage to their networks. Fairfax County Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Sharon Bulova (D) and others local leaders say they want a task force created to investigate the 911 problems, saying it was unacceptable for the system to go out during a major emergency. No one has died because of the 911 issues, local officials said, but it caused at least one close call. A 911 caller could not immediately get through in Prince William County over the weekend, delaying paramedics" response to a person with cardiac issues. The person survived.