The Sheriff’s emergency line is 650.363.4911

Last week’s communication outage made it clear that the Coastside is connected to the rest of the world literally by a bundle of slender threads—a fiber optic cable in the landslide-prone hills along Highway 92.

Coastsider talked Lt. John Quinlan, who used to run the Sheriff’s Coastside substation in Moss Beach and is now with the Sheriff’s Office of Emergency Services, about the problems that we had with 911 emergency service for 24 hours. He told us that phone service has been disrupted four times on the Midcoast and one on the Southcoast before this. The usual cause is people digging in the wrong place.

Quinlan strongly recommends that Coastsiders program the number 650.363.4911 into their cell phones. All cell phone calls to 911 are routed through the California Highway Patrol in Vallejo, which transfers calls to the Sheriff.  But 650.363.4911 rings directly in the Sheriff’s office Redwood City.  I was able to reach a knowledgeable person in the Sheriff’s Office on that number calling from Palo Alto on the day the phones went out.

The substation in Moss Beach has a San Mateo prefix that is part of the Sheriff’s phone system. This made it inaccessible during the outage. But there is a phone connected to the fax line in the Moss Beach substation that is on a local exchange:  650.728.8507.

Quinlan also mentioned that the Sheriff had a radio operating on ham frequencies during the outage, and that Seton’s Coastside Medical Center and Coastside firehouses have radios.