A D.C. Council member is pledging to investigate 911 outages until they are solved. News4 Investigative Reporter Ted Oberg explains.
Minutes after touring D.C.’s troubled 911 call center, D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto unveiled a series of proposed reforms designed to provide more oversight and transparency.
Announcing the measures, Pinto said, “We have to have a 911 call center that is filled with transparency, with accuracy and with speed. D.C. residents and visitors deserve that.”
Officially named D.C.’s Office of Unified Communications, the center says it is one of the nation’s busiest, answering nearly 1.8 million emergency calls a year. By D.C.’s own admission, the system’s had 18 outages this year – 8 of them widespread – almost all since the end of May.
During an outage in July, a 5-month-old baby died as call logs now show confusion over which units to send. It is not clear a faster 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.
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Now McGaffin will be pushed to do more to fix the worrying system and tell D.C. residents about progress and problems.
Pinto, chair of the council’s Judiciary Committee, is pledging to hold monthly oversight hearings to figure out what needs fixing at the 911 center starting this month. She said she will conduct unannounced visits to the center every other week.
“Solutions aren't always built into a new law or a new idea,” Pinto said Monday. “It also requires daily follow-up and oversight to make sure that the agency is, as you say, holding up their end of the bargain, following the law.”
Additionally, Pinto is proposing a D.C. law that would force OUC to publicly release after-action reports within 45 days of possible 911 failures which resulted in serious injury or death. The reports would include detailed dispatch logs, transcripts of 911 calls and their recordings. D.C.’s 911 leadership has not released those recordings in the past, citing caller privacy issues.
The after-action reports would be run by D.C.’s Homeland Security & Emergency Management Agency with OUC, D.C. police and D.C. Fire and EMS contributing. This would allow OUC to be part of their own review.
Asked about an outside agency conducting the reviews, Pinto told News4 the involvement of D.C. police and D.C. fire would encourage transparency.
“This isn't about a blame game. This is about an earnest look into what went wrong so that we can have 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 instead told News4, “OUC is committed to transparency about how we critically evaluate performance to understand root causes, integrate best practices and quickly implement changes in order to continuously improve 911 service for the District of Columbia.”
This is the latest but the not the first time the D.C. Council has tried to force accountability on the 911 center. The council already passed a law mandating the release of times showing how long it actually takes a call to be dispatched. OUC hasn’t complied with that part of the law, instead posting other data. Pinto said she was told it will happen by Oct. 1. OUC did not comment when asked about that by the I-Team.
In recent weeks, the News4 I-Team has reported on the outages, police investigation and longstanding staffing troubles.
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DC Mayor Muriel Bowser’s team unveiled a 22-point plan to fix OUC’s problems. Most prominently, it included upgraded technology to cut down on outages. But not much of it will happen overnight. For instance, D.C. leaders said the technology fix to replace outdated servers could take months.
The council is not currently in session but returns later this month.
