Courts and clerk's offices across Maryland closed Friday due to the global outage — but two couples managed to tie the knot outside a shuttered courthouse.
All afternoon, people came to the doors of Montgomery District Court in Rockville only to realize the court was closed. Some said they missed out on important hearings, and others missed out on the chance to tie the knot. It's an unwelcome sight on your wedding day: a sign announcing the closure of the place you were supposed to say "I do."
Panic set in for Devon and Jerico Pritchett. They're supposed to leave for their honeymoon Saturday, and the outage threw them for a loop.
"I already shed a tear," said Devon, the bride.
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"Yeah, she was devastated," Jerico interjected. "We were all sad."
"We didn’t think it was going to happen today," she said.
As luck would have it, Rev. Daniel Kane was called to the courthouse by another couple who ran into the same problem. Kane saved the day for both couples by officiating their weddings outside the courthouse, with little advance planning.
"Necessity is the mother of invention," he said.
"It's the happiest day of their life, and this is how they want to celebrate their life," he said. "They came here with the intention of being married."
And while the newlyweds were lucky to have someone to help them out, others will have to wait until next week to get their court issues resolved.
It's worth noting, though, that some emergency services having to do with public safety were not impacted by the outage.
"I will say that if there are any emergency-type issues, my office deals with peace orders and protective orders," Montgomery County Sheriff Maxwell Uy said. "I still certainly encourage those to respond to the commissioners' office if the court is closed, because we want to make sure that those types of exigent domestic violence-type orders are still issued."
News4 also looked into how the outage impacted other services.
The DMV in D.C. had limited services at its offices and redirected people to its website. Some hospitals, such as Johns Hopkins and Children's National Hospital, were not affected. Inova Health and the University of Maryland Medical System had to implement downtime procedures as some of their technology had trouble, but they were still able to serve patients.
As for the Pritchetts, they're thankful for their unforgettable wedding experience – even if it wasn't exactly how they planned it.
“Amazing!" the bride said, laughing. "I’m Mrs. Pritchett! I’m amazing! He’s amazing!"
