7News pushes DC's 911 call center for answers on system disruptions

WASHINGTON (7News) — The Office of Unified Communications (OUC) claims a contractor is responsible for its outage on Friday. That’s when a 5-month-old went into cardiac arrest and later died.

During the outage, dispatch struggled to communicate with first responders.

On Tuesday, no one from the OUC, including its director Heather McGaffin, made themselves available to answer questions. They said their seven-line written response provides all answers. In their response, officials blame a contractor for its issues.

7News went inside the PChange Protective Service, dispatch center. It’s run by former officers Lowell Duckett and Kevin Polistin.

“We have watch commanders with hand landline communication,” Duckett said. “If there’s a system failure there’s a hard wire hardline so she can communicate, our officers are trained to call our system directly.”

RELATED | DC contractor fired after botched update disrupts emergency services

The Office of Unified Communications claimed Monday that a contractor incorrectly installing an update is the reason for its dispatch failure.

A 5-month-old went into cardiac arrest and died while its systems were having issues.

7News questioned the city and OUC for two days straight pushing to find out about its backup systems and plans to make sure the community is still protected even with e technical glitch.

The city and OUC still have not answered those questions and said they will not be providing interviews to address the community’s concerns.

7News also asked why OUC’s director Heather McGaffin has not directly answered questions that we presented from the community after the agency she oversees had technical difficulties on Friday with no response.