The 911 emergency system is down across the entire state of Massachusetts.
Boston Fire Department issued an alert on Tuesday advising those in need of emergency services to call the department directly, visit a local firehouse, or pull the alarm in a Fire Box — red boxes that alert nearby firehouses to emergencies.
"The current 911 system is down statewide,if you have an emergency and need assistance pull your nearest Fire Box, or call the Boston Fire Department at 617-343-2880," the department wrote. "You can also get assistance by going to your nearest Firehouse."
The Massachusetts State Police issued an advisory on Tuesday providing the public with a list of numbers to call if they need state police assistance. Those numbers can be found here.
Boston mayor Michelle Wu addressed the outage during a news conference discussing public safety ahead of Friday’s parade celebrating the Boston Celtics’ NBA Championship, according to CNN.
“Never a dull moment, we just wanted to start actually with a notification that currently the statewide 911 system is down and calls are not going through,” she said.
She said “relevant officials” were working to get the situation resolved.
“We’ve been in touch with the state and with all of the relevant officials to work on getting this resolved but in the meantime, obviously there are a number of bits of information that we want to make sure the public has. While we have everyone here, we did want to just pass it on to our first responders and each of the agencies to share what our residents should do in the meantime,” Wu said. “There’s lots of information out there but we will, we need to be covering this outage in the 911 system first.”
The cause of the outage has not been reported at this time, and it is unclear when service will be restored.
Boston Police Department Commissioner Michael Cox during the press conference that state officials were especially determined to spread the word about emergency service contact information due to the soaring temperatures in Boston. The heat index was 90 degrees Fahrenheit in Boston on Tuesday.
“We thought it was important, particularly with the heat that we’re about to experience that we’d give people the opportunity to know what’s going on,” Cox said, according to the New York Times.
