911 outages need better reporting.

Imagine a family member in your house suffers severe chest pains or another medical emergency some night. Or you’re alone upstairs and you hear someone trying to break in downstairs. Or you’re awakened by the smell of smoke. Or you’re still on your way home when you get into a bad car wreck.

You reach for your cellphone to dial 911. It rings. But there’s no answer.

This was the scenario earlier this month in Florida and at least 13 other states on the night of Wednesday, March 8, when the 911 network for AT&T cellphone customers went down, reportedly for more than four hours. AT&T customers weren’t promptly informed of the outage by their carrier. Local emergency officials say they weren’t told right away, either.

We agree with Orange County Mayor Teresa Jacobs, who said, “Cellphone providers should have a moral responsibility to notify their customers of something of this magnitude.” In Orange County, 83 percent of 911 calls come from cellphones, the mayor said.

After the county requested but failed to receive a statement during the outage from the carrier, Jacobs said, she ordered her staff to get the word out to the media and the public, with backup phone numbers that would get through. Orange County Fire Chief Otto Drozd also contacted his counterparts at other emergency agencies around the state, the mayor said.

It wasn’t until hours later that the county was formally notified about the outage in an email from AT&T that lacked contact information or other details, according to Jacobs. We contacted AT&T to verify this information, but the company responded only with a short statement: “We take our 911 obligations to our customers very seriously and will be sharing additional information with the FCC.”

Within hours of the March 8 outage, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai announced that his agency “would investigate the root cause of the outage and its impact.” This is the least the agency can do.

We urge the FCC to go a step further, and heed Jacobs’ request in her March 10 letter to Pai for “a comprehensive review of AT&T’s failure to alert its customers and impacted public safety agencies in a timely fashion.”

But this is not an issue with AT&T alone. T-Mobile had two 911 network outages in one day in August 2014 lasting three hours and affecting its 50 million customers at the time, according to the FCC. Another outage in 2015 involving several carriers lasted up to six hours and affected more than 11 million people, the agency said.

Under current FCC rules, carriers are required to notify local 911 centers when outages occur. Given Orange County’s experience, it’s questionable whether these requirements are strict enough. And as Jacobs has pointed out, carriers seem to have no trouble reaching customers directly through text messages under other scenarios — when they’re about to exceed their data limits, for example.

Of course, a general text message to all customers could create a different set of problems, if it spurred them to flood 911 centers with test calls. These are details for the FCC and carriers to work out. But work them out they must.

Jacobs told the FCC there were “several bona-fide emergencies” during this month’s outage. If another outage were to coincide with a natural disaster or another kind of public-safety crisis with a much wider impact, and cellphone customers weren’t quickly informed and armed with alternatives means of contacting first responders, the consequences could be unthinkable.