Concerns raised after DC 911 call center experiences 6th outage this year

WASHINGTON - D.C.’s 911 call center is once again under fire after their system went down Friday evening.

This comes after a number of calls for change from residents and city leaders following delayed response times that have led to the death of animals and people.

FOX 5 has learned that the city's primary dispatch system went out for 20 minutes Friday around 5:15 p.m.

The city describes this as a connectivity disruption, forcing them to have to dispatch manually.

One D.C. council member calls this situation with the Office of Unified Communications a "crisis". This is the center that is responsible for dispatching 911 calls.

On social media, council member Robert White shared that he’s received a number of calls from residents calling for immediate change.

"I’ve been waving a flag up about this for a long time. It’s a public safety issue. It’s a public health issue. It’s a lifesaving issue," council member Robert White said.

Councilmember White isn’t alone. Just last month, councilmember Brianne Nadeau sent a letter to OUC and the city administrator saying, "the agency's ongoing failures in dispatching assistance where it is needed is alarming and unacceptable."

FOX 5 can confirm that there have been at least five incidents this year involving a disruption in service at OUC due to some form of outage.

Right now, we know that there is an investigation into the death of a 5-year-old baby that died this month in Northwest after a cardiac arrest.

According to reports, OUC was having dispatch issues during the time. At this time, it is unclear if the technical issues contributed to the baby's death.

Councilmember White says enough is enough and he’s actually working on a bill to address the issues at call center.

OUC did add that even though they had to go into manual mode, they are still able to answer 911 and process calls.

FOX 5 reached out to the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Public Safety and Justice for comment. In a statement they said:

"A review conducted by The Office of the Chief Technology Officer, in coordination with The Office of Unified Communications, indicates the technological disruptions to the computer aided dispatch (CAD) were related to the performance of hardware which hosts the CAD software; and the District is working to implement the necessary monitoring and possible system upgrades. While CAD is the primary method for dispatching in the District for FEMS, MPD, and OUC, these agencies are prepared to, and train for, transitioning to manual dispatch, an industry practice, when any disruption occurs that impacts normal operations. Bottomline, OUC is still able to process and receive 911 calls when using manual dispatch and during yesterday afternoon’s disruption, no police or fire dispatch responses were delayed."