It was a long 20 minutes before Jack Halbrook, president of Mountain Alarm, was able to properly monitor his accounts in January when the Ruidoso, N.M.-based central station failed to pick up signals from its accounts one night after business hours. Luckily, Halbrook was offered a helping hand from Alarm Monitoring Services of Metairie, La.
Mountain Alarm usually sends its high security accounts to AMS, but it was not set up to send more than 1,000 accounts when the receivers went down.
Cindy Smith, vice president of operations for AMS, was able to send a spare receiver to Mountain Alarm, set up a block of account numbers and give Hallbrooks the phone number where the accounts could be sent temporarily. The accounts began to be monitored within 30 minutes.
