Flooding rushed into a D.C. doggy day care. Dogs drowned after a dispatcher called it a water leak.

WASHINGTON - As a flash flood poured into the District Dogs doggy day care in Northeast Washington last week, a manager watching the store through a webcam told a 911 call taker “the whole building is going underwater” as the walls gave way. But the message a dispatcher relayed to firefighters in the field was more mundane: The business had a water leak.

D.C. officials acknowledged for the first time Monday that dispatchers could have conveyed more urgency to emergency responders about the flooding that killed 10 dogs, as the city released three 911 call transcripts of authorities being told that people and dogs inside the facility were in danger.

Though the first 911 call describing the wall collapse was made at 5:06 p.m., officials said firefighters did not arrive at District Dogs until 5:29, after two more calls were made to 911. The department said responders did not make contact with the people trapped inside until 5:35, nearly a half-hour after officials were first alerted of flooding.

“I would have liked to be able to get there earlier,” D.C. Fire Chief John Donnelly said at a news conference. “I think one of the things that’s important to realize here is when that front wall collapsed, it was a sudden, catastrophic incident. It was immediate. That wall came in, and the water came rushing in like a waterfall and immediately filled up the room. And at that point, everybody’s life was in danger.”

The incident already had sparked outrage directed at city officials and the owner of the business over why the day care - which saw a similar flood a year ago - was allowed to operate in a flood-prone area. In recent days, the dog owners whose pets died turned their anger toward the emergency response, pressing city officials to release additional details about the 911 calls.

“What I am saying is we could have done things differently,” Office of Unified Communications Director Heather McGaffin said, sidestepping reporters’ questions on whether mistakes were made. “This was an unprecedented event. And so now, as we look at what we could have done differently, we are making changes.”

Emergency responder radio communications from that day show that at 4:57 p.m., fire officials reported seeing people stuck in their vehicles along Rhode Island Avenue. At 5:06, a manager at the day care called from their home in Maryland, saying they could see water rushing through the store on a webcam.

“Water was coming out through the walls and we saw the walls break down through the cameras,” the caller said. “And what’s more [is] that they have big glass windows facing the street. The cameras are not working anymore, but we know people are in danger.”

At 5:09 p.m., another caller, an assistant manager at the day care, made a similarly urgent 911 call.

“The whole place, it looks like a swimming pool right now,” the second caller said. “It’s like the third, fourth time we flooded. This time it’s terrible. The last I seen on the camera, like, the whole everything, our gates and everything, collapse from the water. The water was coming from everywhere. The walls collapsed.”

At 5:10 p.m., a dispatcher appeared to report a “water leak” at District Dogs to the fire department’s incident command on the roadway, according to the recordings. Firefighters were dispatched but were called back, officials said, because the water rescue team was already in the area.

At about 5:10 p.m., officials said, a dispatcher told firefighters at the scene that there was a “flooding situation” at the day care but did not elaborate on that conversation. The fire department on Monday did not provide radio transcripts of encrypted channels from the incident.

“The access to those buildings are all completely flooded right now. You’re going to have to hold that call for a little while until we get these rescues resolved,” a person with the fire department said in the radio recording at 5:13 p.m., later adding, “We’ll have units check it out when they get here.”

McGaffin said at the news conference that call takers took the information given to them by callers and wrote it in a computer-aided dispatch card, also known as a CAD card. From there, a dispatcher reading the card described the incident to firefighters at the scene as a leak. McGaffin said Monday the dispatcher still works at the Office of Unified Communications.

“There is conduct and there’s performance,” she said. “Performance I can help fix with training. Conduct I cannot. This person does not have a conduct issue. This was a performance issue. We are addressing that.”

Fire officials said that when there is an emergency situation, it is less likely they will read the CAD reports themselves, and that they rely on radio communication. Donnelly said if a dispatcher had described the severity of the flood to the incident commander earlier, the department would have responded differently.

Officials said that dispatchers, when learning about the intensity of the flooding, should have elevated the situation to a “water rescue,” which would have prompted officials to send the firefighters already in the area to the day care.

At 5:18 p.m., a worker at District Dogs called 911.

“We are trapped in water,” the third caller said. “We are trapped in water that is above our heads. There are six people trapped in the water and we have no way out.”

The caller said dogs were trapped in the day care’s backroom, and one of the seven workers inside might be in particular danger.

“We have a man in the water who can’t hold on to anything and we haven’t heard anything back from him in a while,” the caller said. “We’re afraid he might not be with us anymore.”

At 5:21 p.m., a dispatcher appeared to tell the incident commander on the scene that there were people trapped at 680 Rhode Island Ave. NE and that there was “12 feet of water inside the business,” according to public safety radio transmissions of the incident. The commander said he would deploy firefighters to the facility. At 5:28, a dispatcher told the commander that someone was unresponsive at the day care, and the commander said a boat was on the way.

The employees stood on a cabinet as the water began to drain out of the store, according to call transcripts. “It went down a couple of feet, but it’s still above our heads,” a caller told 911. Then the caller began to shout, “In here! In here!” records show.

“They’re here,” the caller said. “Should I hang up now?”

“You can hang up as long as you’re with the responders,” the call taker said. At 5:35 p.m., the call was disconnected.