Power Outage at D.C. 911 Call Center Tuesday

The UCC relied on their generator for 13 hours

There was a temporary power outage at D.C.'s 911 call center Tuesday afternoon, affecting communications for the Metropolitan Police Department and Fire and Emergency Medical Services.

The 911 service is restored, but the investigvation into the incident continues.

At 12:47 p.m., the Unified Communications Center (UCC), which houses D.C.'s Office of Unified Communications (OUC) and Homeland Security and Emergency Management, lost electrical power.

Beginning late Monday, the OUC noticed interruptions in the power supply and requested a switch to the generator supply.

The generators failed after 13 hours and officials say there was a "catastrophic communications failure" at the OUC.

At that time, people calling 911 experienced lengthy wait times and the 311 call number, which is used for routine city services, went down for approximately 16 minutes.

More than two dozen callers failed to get through, News4's Mark Segraves reported.

Police radios went out for more than five minutes and operated in back-up mode for 20 minutes until power was restored.

Full power has been restored to the UCC, and systems were functioning normally by 5 p.m. Tuesday.

But 911 call takers are working from a remote location while the failure of the generators is investigated.

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