Almost 100 advisory neighborhood commissioners sent a letter to D.C.’s mayor and the D.C. Council demanding fixes to the city’s 911 call center after numerous mistakes, including some that have resulted in delayed or failed responses to emergencies like the flash flood that killed 10 dogs last month.
The 911 call center handles thousands of calls every day, and many of them are life or death emergencies.
“I don't want to go unnoticed the thousands of calls that they take every single day without incident that help D.C. residents,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said.
While the majority of 911 calls may be handled properly, in recent years, several were not, including the failed response to the flash flooding at District Dogs.
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Graham Forsey, who is deaf and unable to speak on the phone, tried to text 911 recently about a man he saw having what he described as a mental crisis in the middle of a busy street.
“It was a very dangerous situation,” he said through an American Sign Language interpreter. “One wrong step, you could see him being seriously injured or worse.”
Forsey said he received a reply text telling him to make a voice call to 911 as there was no text service available at that time.
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“Really frustrated, and I'm really hoping this is not something that happens often,” Forsey said.
The Office of Unified Communications released a statement saying, "OUC researched the phone number provided and the agency does not have a record of this text received by the DC 911 system. The reply they received is the generic Federal Communications Commission message sent by carriers when they are unable to deliver texts to 911, 'Please make a voice call to 911. There is no text service to 911 available at this time.' A bounce back message from OUC would state: 'Text to 911 is currently unavailable. Please make a voice call to 911. With either response, the individual was instructed to make a voice call to 911.”
“I imagine that it's terrible but I also imagine a lot of people are using text to 911, and so it does become an issue of which text people respond to,” Bowser said. “And so, we need all of our, whether they're call takers or whomever is answering the text to be able to make that judgment call.”
The letter from 97 advisory neighborhood commissioners led by Commissioner Colleen Costello, who lost her dog in the flash flood incident, expresses their grave concerns of failures at the 911 call center they say have led to death and injuries of D.C. residents.
“I haven't seen the letter, so I can't react to it just yet,” Bowser said.
“It really makes me a little nervous,” Forsey said. “If I myself needed help, would I be stuck?”
Bowser and the director of the 911 call center have pointed to staffing shortages as part of the problem.
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