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The wait for a reliable 911 system in D.C. has already taken too long

2023-09-10 00:00:00.0 华盛顿邮报-华盛顿特区原网页

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It will take you less time to read this column than it took for a 911 operator in D.C. to get help to a teenage girl whose mother was dying in front of her.

The girl’s call for help lasted for more than 21 minutes and is painful to listen to. It starts with the sound of crying.

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“What’s the location of your emergency?” an operator asks.

“414 Oglethorpe Street Northeast,” the girl says clearly.

“I’m sorry, can you repeat that?”

A swallowed cry comes from the girl before she says, “414 Oglethorpe Street Northeast Washington D.C.”

The teenager gave the correct address. That detail matters because it shows she didn’t mess up. She was witnessing something terrifying, and she did everything right. Even so, she would have to wait — and wait, and wait, and wait — for emergency workers to help her because they would first go to the wrong address: 414 Oglethorpe Street Northwest.

Time moves differently in an emergency. When you are in one, seconds can seem like minutes and minutes can seem like hours. I remember once waiting in an emergency room with my infant son. He was injured and hungry, and I had mistakenly thrown on a dress that didn’t allow me to easily breastfeed him. I could have waited for a family member to bring me a change of clothes or asked someone at the hospital to lend me a pair of scissors to cut open my outfit, but the urge to ease his discomfort as soon as possible felt so overwhelming that I tore open the top of my dress with my hands. I then sat at the hospital for the next 24 hours in that ripped dress.

I wrote about falling with my baby. Now other moms email me.

As conversations have intensified in recent weeks about the ways D.C.’s 911 call center has failed and continues to fail residents, I have been thinking a lot about what it means to make people wait for help. And each time my thoughts have gone there, they have ended up at the same place: that teenager’s phone call. I first heard it when Dave Statter, a retired WUSA reporter who tracks emergency dispatches, wrote about it on his site.

The call was made in June 2020, and it’s hard to hear it and accept that officials at that time didn’t feel compelled to do whatever was needed to make sure another person didn’t have to wait longer than necessary for help. I have summarized parts of the call for you so that you know what those officials heard.

More than five minutes into the call the teenager tells the operator that her mother is gasping for air.

More than six minutes into the call, the teenager asks, “Do you know how long it will take for them to arrive?” She is assured she should be seeing them “shortly.”

After more than seven minutes, the girl tells the operator that she thinks her mother is no longer breathing. The operator instructs her on how to do chest compressions. “1 … 2 … 3 … 4,” they count together.

After more than eight minutes, the operator tells her the paramedics are there. But they aren’t. The two continue counting.

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After more than 11 minutes, they are still counting.

After more than 13 minutes, they are still counting.

After more than 17 minutes, they are still counting.

97 D.C. neighborhood leaders urge change in city response to 911 calls

On Tuesday, nearly 100 D.C. neighborhood representatives signed and sent a letter to city leaders, expressing “grave and growing concerns about the performance and dependability” of the city’s Office of Unified Communications, which is responsible for handling 911 calls and texts and dispatching emergency workers.

“Far from being a lifeline to residents, OUC’s 911 service has repeatedly hindered access to lifesaving care,” reads the letter, which is addressed to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), Office of Unified Communications Director Heather McGaffin and D.C. Council members. “These chronic problems have diminished residents’ faith in our city’s emergency response system, and in your ability, as city leaders, to resolve them.”

The letter calls on city officials to take several actions, including holding an Office of Unified Communications oversight hearing and creating an independent 911 task force that would examine “chronic and systemic problems” and issue recommendations. It also calls on the agency to make all 911 call recordings or transcripts available, without identifying information, to anyone who requests them. Currently, the letter says, the agency only releases those to the person who made the call and only after a Freedom of Information Act request is submitted.

The demands outlined in that letter are reasonable and putting them into action would go far toward building public trust where little now exists. Last month, 10 dogs drowned after it took emergency responders 23 minutes to arrive at a flooding dog day care. The deaths have led to increased criticism of the 911 call center. They have also brought a renewed, and important, focus on the emergency response delays that have ended with human lives lost.

D.C. has long struggled with 911 calls. Then 10 dogs died in a flood.

After all, when we’re talking about long wait times during emergencies, what we are ultimately talking about is the potential loss of mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, neighbors and co-workers. Call-taking errors and dispatch delays have been tied to the deaths of multiple people in D.C. in recent years, including a newborn in cardiac arrest, a 3-month-old boy pulled from a hot car and a 69-year-old man who collapsed.

Billie Shepperd’s granddaughter is the teenager who made that 911 call. That day, her granddaughter lost a mother and she lost a daughter. Sheila Shepperd was 59 years old when she experienced a heart attack and paramedics were unable to save her after they arrived.

“These kinds of failures happen too often — for human beings, dogs, property — and it extends through one’s whole family,” Billie Shepperd told my colleagues for an article they wrote last month. “There is not just one victim, and I say that because of what happened to me.”

Her granddaughter should never have been forced to wait so long for help, and three years later, D.C. residents shouldn’t still be waiting for the city to take needed actions that would help keep others from experiencing unnecessarily long waits.

More than 20 minutes into that teenager’s call, the operator continues to count: “1 … 2 … 3 … 4.”

After more than 21 minutes, the voice of a paramedic can be heard talking to the teenager.

“How long has she been out?” he asks.

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