What should you do if 911 can't pick up?
Wednesday night through Thursday morning, Santa Maria and parts of Santa Barbara County experienced outages that affected access to the 911 call center.
These types of outages have impacted various communities over the last year, so if you ever call 911 and can’t get through, Lt. Woodrow Vega with the Santa Maria Police Department says it’s good to be prepared.
"If 911 goes down, they can call our non-emergency line for emergencies and non-emergencies, and then we have an alternative emergency line, a seven-digit number you can call,” Lt. Vega explained.
Vega added that if a 911 service outage occurs at one station, calls will be automatically transferred to the nearest sheriff's department as a backup so there is no loss of 911 service.
Santa Maria police say their lines were down for around three hours while Santa Barbara emergency management officials said the countywide outage was resolved by 8 a.m. Thursday.
In non-emergencies, you can also try reaching out to the police via social media or their official websites.
