D.C. emergency dispatchers took four minutes to send D.C. Fire personnel to the scene of a Brightwood fire that killed two people, including a 9-year-old boy. The city’s own response time standards (which mirror national standards) call for 90 percent of calls to be dispatched in less than 64 seconds.

FOX 5 was the first to report on the four-minute response time and on the outrage from the D.C. firefighters’ union.

“Every second makes a difference when you’re trapped in a building and you can’t get out. Seconds count, and in that instance it took minutes to dispatch the call,” says Dabney Hudson, president of the Firefighters Union Local 36. “I couldn’t say whether people would have lived or died [had firefighters been dispatched sooner], but the sooner we get there, the sooner we can start to make a difference and get people out.”

The first call to emergency dispatchers came in at 9:36 a.m. on August 18, per the Office of Unified Communications, which handles emergency calls. It wasn’t until 9:40 a.m. that the dispatcher sent personnel to the scene.

The director of the OUC, Karima Holmes, told WTOP that she believed the dispatcher who took the call acted appropriately and did nothing wrong. “Overall, my thoughts about it is that there was no delay, no slow response,” she told the outlet. “Different calls take different times. There are some 911 calls we get out in 30 seconds because the information is there, we have everything we needed. It gets done. Some calls take longer … So what we’ve done in the industry, we’ve shied away from rushing through calls, and we really looked at the quality of a call—and that’s what you have here.”

Holmes told the outlet that she “listened to the call, I read the notes, I looked for any gap anywhere where we could have collapsed this timeline and we couldn’t. We got it in as fast as we could.”

The OUC tells DCist in an email statement that it stands behind its dispatcher’s handling of the call. “While we believe our employees performed appropriately with the information given in this challenging incident, as an agency we will continue to review what happened and evaluate what we can learn from it,” the statement reads. “In this instance, despite the complex circumstances surrounding the initiation of the dispatch, this incident was handled both according to protocol and in the most efficient manner possible. From the time of the initial notification by radio from the MPD officer and the first unit’s arrival time it took about 7 minutes, within our average response time.”

The OUC told FOX5 that the delay was partially the result of the fact that the fire was called in via police radio instead of a phone call to 911. A police officer on the scene used his radio to flag the fire, but he was delayed in getting all the appropriate information to the dispatcher because he was trying to attend to the fire simultaneously himself. Before she dispatched firefighters, the dispatcher sent police units with breach kits (kits that help emergency personnel ram or cut their way into a vehicle or building) when the officer asked for them.

Per WTOP, Holmes said that another reason the call took four minutes was the dispatcher was dealing with another “life-threatening, priority-one medical call” at the same time. That caller immediately provided all the relevant information, and was dispatched first, while the dispatcher continued to monitor the fire call and update notes with relevant information.

Hudson says this is not an appropriate excuse for a delayed response time in a large city where multiple emergencies might overlap with one another. “If a call center in a major metropolitan area can’t handle two significant calls at once, they should look at their systems and their training,” he says.

The fire consumed the unlicensed rental in Brightwood, which was occupied by about a dozen immigrants from Ethiopia. Officials have said that the home was full of fire hazards that made it difficult for rescuers to reach people inside, including security gates sectioning off parts of the property and hallways so narrow that opening one door often blocked another. Nine-year-old Yafet Solomon and a 40-year-old man the Washington Post has identified as Fitsum Kebede both died in the blaze.

The District announced last week that a police officer had flagged the illegal rental and potentially unsafe conditions to the Department of Consumer and Regulatory Affairs and to D.C. Fire and EMS months before the fatal fire. Neither agency appropriately followed up, and four government officials have been placed on leave.

DCRA sent an investigator to the property three times, but the investigator was never able to gain access, and the city closed the case without ever inspecting the premises. The agency has reopened 67 closed cases as a result of these revelations, and will likely reopen even more, NBC Washington reported. D.C. Fire never followed up on the case at all.