Changes, upgrades coming to DC’s 911 system after major outages

WASHINGTON (DC News Now) — There have been several high-profile incidents of D.C.’s 911 system going down.

Now, the Office of Unified Communications is getting a much-needed upgrade.

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The IT issues are just part of the problem. There are also major staffing issues that some allege have led to errors.

City officials spoke for the first time publicly since a baby died while the system shut down earlier this month.

Since December of last year, D.C. City Administrator, Kevin Donahue, said there have been 18 incidents of the 911 system going down for a period of time.

“Eight of the 18 had some pretty significant effects. It has more systemic in nature and most of those dealt with dispatch,” Donahue said.

One of those outages on Aug. 2 lasted two hours. Donahue said a contract employee pushed a change to every workstation at the 911 center instead of the planned one or two stations.

“Totally unacceptable. Totally outside of the norm and expectation of what this person should have done,” Donahue said.

The contractor was fired that day and the Metropolitan Police Department is investigating what happened.

“Whether it was a mistake, perhaps lack of training, lack of similarity, or whether it was negligence of a criminal nature is an open question,” Donahue said.

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During that time a five-month-old died. The family first couldn’t contact 911 and then with pen and paper, dispatchers sent medics who were already on another call to the address.

Donahue said everyone followed protocol.

“But the protocol wasn’t sufficient to be able to accurately understand that we had a unit that the system showed us available, but in fact wasn’t,” Donahue said.

OUC Director Heather McGaffin said her staff did all they could.

“My condolences to the family. Losing a child is unimaginable. Our call takers did everything that they could in those moments to reassure and offer guidance during that time,” McGaffin said.

Donahue said they have a 22-point plan to address the computer-aided dispatch outages.
The most important part is equipment upgrades.

“The equipment we have was not able to keep up with the demands that are being placed on it,” Donahue said.

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Around $2.5 million of upgrades wasn’t going to start until the new fiscal year on Oct. 1 but because of these incidents, the IT has money now to start doing upgrades.

“We have to learn from that and change how we do things so that there’s not going to be another instance of a family in a similar circumstance,” Donahue said.

Another big component of the problems with 911 is staffing.

Twenty-two call takers are starting at the end of this month. Nineteen vacant dispatcher positions will be filled through promotions from within OUC.

D.C. handles about 1.8 million calls a year. Call takers and dispatchers handle 70 or 80 calls per 12-hour shift.

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McGaffin said when they’re fully staffed they’ll look at reducing shift hours from 12 to eight or 10.

“We hold people accountable. We retrain and we separate when we have to,” McGaffin said.

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