LEONARDTOWN — St. Mary’s County is shopping for a second, separate internet connection for its backup emergency operations site so that a single severed fiber line cannot cut off both of the county’s links at once.
The county has requested quotes from Comcast, Breezeline and Verizon for a 10-gigabit line at the backup center, which county staff call the bunker, Chief Information Officer Glenn Maynes told the St. Mary’s County Emergency Services Board at its October meeting. The faster line would become the county’s primary connection, and the existing 1-gigabit line would become the backup.
The goal, Maynes said, is true redundancy with “no shared fate,” meaning the two lines would follow different physical paths so damage to one would not affect the other.
He pointed to what prompted the work. Network Maryland, the state’s fiber network, cut its fiber all at once along the route through Hollywood, severing roughly 500 strands, Maynes said. He did not describe how long any connection was down or whether emergency services were affected. With separate paths, he said, a similar cut in either location would leave the other line working.
Maynes did not give a cost estimate or timeline for the new line, and the board took no vote on it.
911 call data to the firehouse
The redundancy work runs alongside a three-phase project to push computer-aided dispatch information directly to fire stations and apparatus, an update Department of Emergency Services staff presented to the board.
- Done in mid-September: the notification system that sends alerts to responders’ apps, whether a company uses Chief 360, Active911 or another program, and a dispatch exporter that pushes the incident details responders asked to see to their pagers, station displays and apparatus displays.
- Underway: with money approved by the county commissioners, the county ordered a server to copy the dispatch database and is building a vendor-neutral connection, known as an API, that any alerting company can pull from.
- Target: the project is expected to be finished by April.
“We don’t care who the vendor is on the other side,” Maynes said of the approach. He said work on the application is moving ahead while the county waits for the server to arrive.
Maynes started as the county’s chief information officer in August. He told the board he has more than 30 years of information technology experience, most of it as chief technology officer for Prince George’s County, where one of his first projects, as a contractor, was integrating that county’s dispatch system.
Part of a larger emergency communications rebuild
The county has spent the past year reworking how it reaches residents and responders. A data breach hit the CodeRED alert platform the county used in November 2025, and this spring a new emergency notification system replaced CodeRED. The county has also worked to shore up 911 dispatcher staffing. Emergency services staff told the board four of the eight contract dispatchers the county requested are now onboarding and that the 911 center has two vacancies.
