The Monongalia County 911 center was out of service for about an hour Saturday morning. And to alert residents to the problem, a county wide emergency notification was sent out around 5:15 am to over 6 thousand phones. The message gave residents an alternate phone number to call and report an emergency during the outage. MECCA officials say they wanted to let people know before there was an emergency, rather than calling 911 and not getting an answer.

The phone line was restored in about an hour, Verizon is still unsure of what caused the outage.