DC 911 directors face monthly questions from City Council – NBC4 Washington

Minutes after touring the troubled emergency call center in Washington, DC, DC Council Member Brooke Pinto presented a series of reform proposals designed to provide more clarity and transparency.

Announcing the measures, Pinto said: “We need an emergency response center that is transparent, accurate and fast. That is what the residents and visitors of Washington DC deserve.”

The center, officially called DC’s Office of Unified Communications, says it is one of the busiest in the country, answering nearly 1.8 million emergency calls annually. DC says it has had 18 outages of the system this year, including eight large-scale outages, almost all of them since late May.

A power outage in July left a five-month-old baby dead. Call logs now show confusion over which units to send. It’s not clear whether a quicker response could have saved the child’s life. OUC Director Heather McGaffin said last month that no single person on her team was to blame.

Now McGaffin is being pushed to do more to fix the troubling system and keep Washington, D.C., residents informed of progress and problems.

Pinto, chair of the council’s Judiciary Committee, is promising to hold monthly oversight hearings starting this month to figure out what needs to be fixed at the emergency center. She said she will make unannounced visits to the center every other week.

“Solutions are not always built into a new law or a new idea,” Pinto said Monday. “It also requires daily follow-up and monitoring to ensure that the agency, as you say, is holding up its end of the bargain and following the law.”

In addition, Pinto is proposing legislation for Washington DC that would require OUC to release dispatch reports within 45 days of possible emergency call failures that resulted in serious injury or death. The reports would include detailed dispatch logs, transcripts of emergency calls, and their recordings. Washington DC’s 911 line has not released these recordings in the past due to concerns about caller privacy.

The incident reports would be prepared by the Homeland Security & Emergency Management Agency in Washington DC, with input from OUC, DC Police, and DC Fire and EMS. This would allow OUC to participate in its own reviews.

When asked if the reviews would be conducted by an outside agency, Pinto told News4 that involving DC Police and Fire would provide more transparency.

“This is not about assigning blame. It’s about seriously examining what went wrong so we can make improvements,” she said.

Questions to OUC and the mayor’s staff about the proposal were not answered Monday afternoon.

In a statement, an OUC spokesperson told News4 instead: “The OUC is committed to transparency in how we critically evaluate performance to understand root causes, incorporate best practices, and quickly implement changes to continually improve 911 service for the District of Columbia.”

This is the latest, but not the first, time the D.C. Council has tried to hold the 911 dispatch center accountable. The council has already passed a law requiring the publication of times showing how long it actually takes for a 911 call to be routed. OUC has not complied with that part of the law and has instead published other data. Pinto said she was told it would happen by Oct. 1. OUC did not provide comment when asked by the I-Team.

Over the past few weeks, the News4 I-Team has been reporting on the outages, the police investigations and the long-standing staffing problems.

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Mayor Muriel Bowser’s team in Washington DC has unveiled a 22-point plan to address OUC’s problems, which will primarily include improved technology to reduce outages. But much of this will not happen overnight. For example, DC officials said the technology upgrade to replace outdated servers could take months.

The Council is not currently in session but will meet again later this month.