back up

They had recommended trying a cell phone or going to the nearest fire station if you have an emergency.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/2014/apr/10/washington-wide-911-outage/

I also got a middle of the night robocall from Norcomm (a local EM response agency) advising on this outage - they recommended a number of non-emergency numbers that can backdoor into 911 services.

Seems restored now - the last (localized) 911 system failure came as a result of a cascading failure of disparate systems at CenturyLink. Pretty weird events, not supposed to happen again.

I have the direct phone numbers for my local PD and FD in my phone. The local PD is also the dispatch center, and I have that number memorized as well. I ended up putting the numbers for several nearby PD's in my phone for when I'm traveling through those parts.