Last month alone, more than 10,000 calls to D.C.’s 911 went unanswered. Sometimes, the person calling would hang up quickly because they made the call by accident, or maybe they’d be disconnected because they were walking into a building or someplace where the signal would drop.
But anecdotes about 911 calls being disconnected as soon as someone is moved into a queue to speak to a call taker have been pouring into city leaders offices for months, and after further investigation they found one common denominator — the cellphone that was used to make the call used Verizon as a carrier.
This week, the Office of Unified Communications and D.C. Council member Brooke Pinto confirmed there has been a problem with Verizon dropping calls, and the city is working with the telecommunications carrier to fix the issue. While it hasn’t been solved yet, OUC director Heather McGaffin told the council during an oversight hearing on Monday that a workaround has been put in place in the meantime.
“When you call 911 and we are experiencing a spike in call volume, you are getting a queue that says, ‘You’ve reached D.C. 911, please don’t hang up,'” said McGaffin. “That is considered a delivered call to D.C. 911. As long as you don’t hang up, you’ll stay in that queue. If you do hang up … we’re going to call you back. One of the vendors was not considering that a delivered call. They were dropping callers.”
McGaffin said it was during a meeting with Pinto’s staff when they were going over call logs that the anecdotal evidence turned into something more substantive.
“I said, ‘Well, this is strange, this person hung up right at this mark.’ And then the next one, I was like, ‘This is not a coincidence.’ I don’t believe in those, and so we need to do a little bit of extra digging,” she said.
After the hearing on Monday, McGaffin was hesitant to go further into details, vowing to offer up something more substantial in the future. Pinto also spoke, adding that it’s a national problem that’s affected other cities, too.
“The carrier was dropping many of those callers once they entered the queue line,” said Pinto. “And so we both need the public to know if you’re in the queue line, wait and don’t hang up. But we also need the carrier to know that call is not finalized yet, and you cannot be dropping those calls.”
A spokesperson for Verizon confirmed the carrier is working with D.C. to address the issue, adding that it “reliably delivers” wireless calls to 911 “in accordance with industry and public safety standards.” But follow-up questions about how long this has been a problem, and how often it’s occurred, have not been answered.
“That carrier will have to make fixes on their end so that they’re delivering the call the proper way,” said McGaffin. “We’re meeting with them almost every other day to say, ‘Where are you?'”
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