DC Office of Unified Communications director Karima Holmes, shown testifying at a DC Council hearing in November, returned Jan. 23 for a performance oversight hearing that aired continuing concerns about dispatch times. (Photo by Julia Airey)

After Kennedy Street, questions and delays continue at DC 911

By Sloane Airey On Jan 31, 2020 Last updated Feb 6, 2020

Last week’s DC Council oversight hearing into the District’s 911 call center — normally a banal annual meeting — instead revealed that the agency is falling short on some critical standards and had failed to give the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority the updated phone number to make emergency calls from Metro stations.

The DC Office of Unified Communications (OUC) answers 911 calls and dispatches first responders to emergencies, working with both the Metropolitan Police Department and the Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department. Over the past year the agency has faced heated criticism at times, including for taking too long to send help to a building fire on Kennedy Street NW in August that killed two people.

At the hearing, OUC director Karima Holmes highlighted several improvements made to the agency over the past year — including a new mobile 911 center for disasters — but noted that “none of us at OUC are satisfied when there is a loss of life.”

Kevin Donahue, deputy mayor for public safety and justice, praised Holmes for making “critical investments” to the agency that will “ultimately result in improvements in response and dispatch times.”

But the chair of the DC Council’s Committee on the Judiciary and Public Safety said that more needs to be done.

“The hearing uncovered that we need to focus more on staff training, cross-training among types of calls from different public safety partners, and agency collaboration,” Ward 6 Council member Charles Allen told The DC Line when asked how the Jan. 23 meeting will shape his plans for the upcoming budget season.

An Aug. 18 fire in a converted row house at 708 Kennedy St. NW led to two deaths. The property was used as a rooming house but lacked the necessary permits. (Photo courtesy of DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department)

After August’s deadly fire on Kennedy Street

The DC Council convened a special oversight hearing last November to investigate why the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs (DCRA) failed to investigate the dangerous conditions inside the illegal Kennedy Street boarding house, as well as why OUC took four minutes to dispatch help to the police officer who first spotted the deadly fire.

But during last week’s council hearing, former reporter and public safety advocate Dave Statter said that the 911 problem was bigger than just Kennedy Street: He shared a list of a dozen other calls since then that he’s tracked over a scanner in which dispatch was delayed or emergency personnel were sent to the wrong address.

“Three of the delays involved sending firefighters to the wrong quadrant of the city for reported fires,” said Statter, who urged the council to open an investigation into the agency. “These mishandled calls show OUC workers don’t have a clear understanding of dispatch protocols, basic fire department procedures or the city’s geography.”

“These delays unnecessarily hamstring firefighters and EMTs and police officers and make emergency scenes more complex and difficult to mitigate,” agreed DC Fire Fighters Association IAFF Local No. 36 president Dabney Hudson.

The dispatches with the longest delays Statter logged since the Kennedy Street fire were emergency calls from Metrorail stations: 11 minutes to respond to a report of an arcing transformer at the Friendship Heights station; 15 minutes for a man on the tracks at the Waterfront station; and 17 minutes for a train collision at Farragut West.

“We started looking at the data to try to find out why WMATA was on hold for so long — it was a couple minutes here, three or four minutes there — and we found out that they were using an old number” that gave the calls a lower priority in the queue, Holmes said in response.

In an email to The DC Line Monday, Allen wrote, “It’s clear that OUC and WMATA, including [the Metro Transit Police Department], need to quickly build a stronger relationship among leadership and line staff, but this also seems to have been a regional breakdown between WMATA and our DMV 911 centers – not an issue unique to our OUC.”

Metro spokesperson Ian Jannetta disagreed, telling The DC Line that it’s the responsibility of the local jurisdictions to provide the right call numbers for Metro to program into that system. “Metro staff in the control center don’t dial anything; they press a button, labeled by jurisdiction, that is hard-coded as a speed-dial to the respective 911 center,” he said.

Regardless of who was responsible to the mixup, the correct number is now in use, Jannetta confirmed.

OUC has also made some recent changes, including the way it trains the employees who decide what resources to send to an emergency. The newest dispatchers are now trained in how to handle police calls as well as fire and medical calls. “That’s something that’s coming from Kennedy Street, actually — [having] cross-dispatchers,” said Holmes.

Falling short of national standards

Attendees at last week’s meeting all acknowledged the difficulty OUC faces in managing 1.7 million calls to 911 last year. However, firefighters union president Hudson also noted that OUC “continues to underperform and not meet national standards.”

Holmes testified that call takers now transfer 81% of high-priority medical calls to a dispatcher within a 1.75-minute timeframe — below the 90% benchmark set by the National Fire Protection Association (NFPA).

“We would like to meet them 90% of the time, but we don’t,” Holmes said at the hearing, referring to the standards.

In an emailed statement to The DC Line today, OUC spokesperson Wanda Gattison wrote that “neither the OUC nor the entire 911 industry has fully adopted the NFPA standards.”

“The standards do not address the evolution of emergency call-taking and dispatching” best practices at the type of 911 center that DC has, Gattison wrote, and because of that, “OUC continues to assess its call management performance holistically.”

Gattison clarified that the 81% figure Holmes cited in her testimony measured only high-priority “Advanced Life Support” medical calls.

The agency’s annual reports indicate 66.3% of all 911 calls were routed to dispatchers within 90 seconds, up from 58.5% three years ago. Gattison did not respond to multiple requests for more data on call processing times, or the frequency of delays like the ones Statter recorded.

“This trajectory [suggests] that we are getting closer to 90%, and we support the agency’s commendable improvements,” Allen told The DC Line when asked about the standards on Monday.

Several OUC employees testified at last week’s hearing wearing matching black jackets and buttons to express their support for Holmes and the progress she has made on long-standing issues within the agency since Mayor Muriel Bowser appointed her in 2016.

The mayor’s office scrutinized OUC in 2015 after a toddler choked to death waiting for an ambulance OUC mistakenly dispatched from too far away. The investigation revealed a new digital dispatch system “malfunctioned almost daily” and forced the DC Fire and Emergency Medical Services Department to temporarily go back to radio communications, as reported by The Washington Post.

Later that same year the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) requested that OUC obtain an “independent outside audit” of the average time it takes employees to process and dispatch calls compared to national averages in the wake of the January 2015 deadly L’Enfant Plaza Metro station smoke incident, in which 91 people were injured and one person died.

The NTSB confirmed on Wednesday that it is still waiting for the audit it requested of OUC after the aforementioned L’Enfant Plaza Metro incident. NTSB’s Safety Recommendations Division chief Jeffrey Marcus said OUC informed the transit safety watchdog in 2016 that it thought that the call center’s new annual audits done internally would suffice.

“As a result, they did not believe that they needed what we recommended, a new auditing, oversight, and review process for OUC call processing, as these processes were well-established,” Marcus told The DC Line. “When we replied we disagreed with their belief that they did not need to create the independent review that we recommended.”

Allen said he takes “no position” on when the NTSB-ordered audit should be done. The OUC did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

“We still need to focus on improving dispatch times more broadly, and I made this clear in last week’s performance oversight hearing that I want to continue to see improvements,” Allen told The DC Line when asked why he chose not to order an investigation into OUC after the Kennedy Street fire.

An independent investigation DC officials ordered into DCRA after the deadly blaze revealed “nine critical moments” when city employees failed to act on prior information that the illegal boarding house posed a danger to its tenants. Attorney General Karl Racine also announced he’s pursuing a criminal investigation into the fire at Bowser’s request.

“It will remain my chief focus with OUC moving forward,” Allen said of improving dispatch times. “If we need to take a deeper review, I know there are further steps the council can take.”

Statter told The DC Line in an email Wednesday that the current situation was “disappointing” but that he planned to continue tracking emergency calls in DC for evidence of delays.

“What I can’t review — and is mostly hidden from the public — is the everyday handling of 911 calls,” he said. “It’s long past time that the reality of what’s going on inside an agency crucial to the safety of the public is known.”