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WRC-TV in Washington aired a story last night about a 911 call for trouble breathing in Montgomery County, Maryland where the call taker fell asleep. The News4 I-Team story by Tisha Thompson and Rick Yarborough says the dispatcher is a veteran uniformed firefighter who was in the 17th hour of a 24-hour shift on overtime and can be heard snoring on the recording of that 911 call (above).

From WRC-TV:

“The employee was immediately removed from the floor by his supervisor that night and placed on administrative leave with pay pending the inquiry,” Montgomery County Assistant Fire Chief Scott Graham said.

The News4 I-Team found Montgomery County dispatchers work twice as long as other dispatchers in the D.C. area. In Fairfax County, dispatchers work 12.5-hour shifts.  In Prince George’s County they work a 12-hour shift.  The District has a 10-hour shift.

(IAFF Local 1664 Vice President Jeffrey) Buddle said while a 24-hour shift “may seem like a long shift to someone who’s not used to that schedule, it’s something that’s just normal for a firefighter to work.”

Both he and Graham say this is the first time someone has fallen asleep during a 24-hour shift.

 Click here to read the entire story

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Listen to 911 calls via KMGH-TV

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AP:

Emergency officials told confused residents not to worry after they reported a fire on the outskirts of Denver, including at least two residents who later were found dead in their burning home, 911 calls released by officials Tuesday showed.

Residents began calling to express concern about the fire and high winds around 2 p.m., and at first dispatchers assured them the heavy smoke and flames were part of a controlled burn that wasn’t a threat. Later they acknowledged that there was some trouble with a prescribed burn but told callers that firefighters were at the scene.

Jefferson County sheriff’s office spokeswoman Jacki Kelley said sheriff’s officials were aware the controlled burn had broken its perimeter that afternoon but she said the agency didn’t know the fire had gotten out of control until a local fire department sent a notification at 5 p.m. She said that’s when a firefighter first made a suggestion for evacuations.

“We have to listen to what groups in the field are telling us,” Kelley said of why evacuations weren’t called earlier. “If they’re saying there’s a controlled burn and the state forest service is on the scene, we don’t just create evacuations for a fire that has gone outside the perimeter.”

Residents in the mountains are particularly sensitive to smoke in the air, and it wasn’t unusual for dispatchers to receive calls about seeing smoke from the controlled burn, Kelley said. The dispatchers’ messages to callers changed as the situation changed, she said.

The 911 calls raised further questions about emergency officials’ response to last week’s fast-growing fire, which authorities believe killed three people, damaged or destroyed more than two dozen homes and burned 6 square miles in the mountains southwest of Denver.

Resident Sam Lucas, who died along with his wife, was among the first to call around 2 p.m. on March 26 after returning home. The dispatcher, having already answered a handful of calls about the fire, cut Lucas off to tell him it was a controlled burn and that the forest service was on the scene.

“We got 79-mile-an-hour winds out there and they got a controlled burn?” Lucas said on the 911 call, one of 130 calls over a total of 10 hours released Tuesday.

When the dispatcher says yes, he replies “Oh wonder. Thank you.”

A neighbor has said Lucas, 77, and his wife, Linda, 76, were packed and ready to go if they got orders to evacuate. Authorities say they did eventually get one but it’s not clear when.

A friend concerned about the third person who apparently died in the fire also called to ask authorities to check on Ann Appel because she was getting chemotherapy and her husband was out of state. However, that call seems to have come after it was too late to help her.

“She’s a little sickly. We have no idea if anybody even knows she’s there,” the caller said. “We know the fire went through her property because we were able to get ahold of the neighbor.”

The caller said Appel — who didn’t get an evacuation notice — wasn’t answering her phone. Meanwhile, authorities say evacuation orders were sent in error to homes that weren’t in the fire’s path.

“She had her stuff to leave. The car had a flat tire,” the caller said.

The dispatcher took Appel’s number and address and said, “We’ll get someone out there to make sure she got out, OK?”

Searchers found human remains in Appel’s burned-out home on Saturday.

“The information at the time was we had a controlled burn, and fire agencies were on scene,” said Jefferson County sheriff’s spokesman Mark Techmeyer. “In law enforcement, you want to minimize radio traffic. There would be no reason to air out something that’s already common knowledge.”

He said the dispatchers weren’t giving interviews about what happened.

The fire appears to have been sparked by a controlled burn set four days earlier by the Colorado State Forest Service, which says embers escaped from the burn sometime on the afternoon of March 26. A review of what happened has been ordered by the governor.

The first wave of automated calls ordering residents to evacuate was sent at 5:05 p.m. but they went to the wrong list of phone numbers, Techmeyer said.

“It was way too large geographically,” he said, adding that he had no other details. “That was a user error on our end.”

That call was halted, and a new round of calls was started at 5:23 p.m., he said.

The 911 recordings show that that initial bad round of notifications caused even more confusion in the dispatch center.

Calls from people who wrongly got evacuation notices are mixed with more residents calling to report smoke and fire nearby. Dispatchers appear to become increasingly overwhelmed while fielding so many types of calls back-to-back.

Simultaneously, residents who were under mandatory evacuation called dispatchers to find out if they had to leave their homes. Some of those people do not indicate they received evacuation notices before calling 911 themselves.

A caller named Neal Biller on Sunburst Drive told a dispatcher he didn’t get an evacuation call but a neighbor did.

The dispatcher said he didn’t need to evacuate if he didn’t get a call, but Biller asked her to look up his address.

A few seconds later the dispatcher said, “OK, yeah, it looks like on Sunburst you are to evacuate, so yes, do evacuate.”

“Wow. Really?” Biller said.

“I wonder why you didn’t get the call?” the dispatcher asked.

“Well I’m glad I called,” Biller said.

Some dispatchers did urge people to err on the side of caution and evacuate if they felt they were in danger.

FirstCall Network Inc., which provides the county’s automated phone call system, said the first round of calls went to anyone who had signed up for the service on a county website, whether or not they lived in the evacuation area.

FirstCall logged slightly different times for the erroneous call — 4:50 p.m. — and for the start of the second round of calls, 5:16 p.m.

FirstCall’s president, Matthew Teague, said the corrected calls went to 1,089 phone numbers in six waves, the last one starting at 9:14 p.m.

Teague said 12 busy signals were detected and 32 calls weren’t answered. Another 90 calls went to numbers that had been disconnected or were not set up to receive voice calls. In each case, the system made three attempts to call those numbers, he said.

Intermountain Rural Electric Association, which provides power to the area, cut off the electricity at about 8 p.m., spokesman Mike Kopp said.

That could have rendered some phones inoperable, but residents with cell phones still could get the evacuation order, Techmeyer said.

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When you look at the 911 stats reported by an auditor hired by the City of Atlanta you have to wonder if the Atlanta Journal Constitution got this one wrong. There is no indication at this point that's the case. But to take as long as five minutes and thirty seconds for a call taker to send the call to a dispatcher 95 percent of the time is somewhat chilling.

Then again, I am not exactly sure what the "as long as" part means in this case. The article doesn't use the word "average". Are these the unusual ones that take that long? I get the impression that's not the case from reading the article, but I would love to see the actual auditor's report and the language used.

From the AP:

Atlanta's auditor says the time between an Atlanta 911 operator taking an emergency call and relaying that information to dispatchers is more than 10 times the recommended national average.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution says the report by auditor Leslie Ward says the damage done by the delay is compounded by delays in dispatching fire fighters or paramedics.

Ward said Tuesday that quicker responses reduce property damage and the chance of injury or loss of life.

The national standard is that information should be transferred from a 911 operator to a dispatcher within 30 seconds at least 95 percent of the time. The report says in Atlanta, that first transfer of information takes as long as 337 seconds in 95 percent of cases.

Here's an excerpt from the AJC.com article by Rhonda Cook:

The national standard is also that it should take less than a minute to dispatch emergency medical responders but in Atlanta, that took more than three minutes in 90 percent of the calls last year.

"It could cost both lives and property," Atlanta Fire Rescue Chief Kelvin Cochran said of the delays.

The audit was begun to review Atlanta Fire Rescue staffing, but Ward said the focus shifted to the handling of calls.

She noted that her office was unable to do a complete audit of response time because 90 percent of the calls for a medical emergency are routed through Grady Hospital first before the more serious ones are returned to a fire department dispatcher. That means once the call leaves the city's E911 system, there is no "time recorded," Ward said. "There's a gap."

Read timeline

Previous coverage of this story here, here & here

The latest from Alameda, California and the drowning on May 30th of Raymond Zack where police officers and firefighters were ordered not to go into the water.

From MercuryNews.com:

The tapes revealed a 1 hour, 15 minute effort by dispatchers to track down a boat to help rescue Zack, only to be turned down by nearby departments, including the Coast Guard, whose boat could not enter the shallow waters. A capable boat was finally found nearly an hour after the first call for help.

Throughout the incident, which began at 11:30 a.m., police and firefighters remained on the beach until a passer-by pulled Zack's body to shore at 12:30 p.m. Zack was pronounced dead a short time later at Alameda Hospital.

Officers remained on the beach because Zack was suicidal and potentially violent, police said. But they also said the 911 tapes help show their efforts to save Zack's life.

From KGO-TV:

As those 9-1-1 calls came in, at least 10 Alameda firefighters and police officers watched from the shore. The first responders never went into the water because they say they were not trained to help with water rescues.

As they stood by, newly-released dispatch logs show how other rescue workers scrambled to respond.

The Coast Guard told a dispatcher it would take 40 minutes for its boat to arrive. The Alameda County Sheriff's Department said it didn't have a boat in the water.

Watch raw video of rescue

From Matt Jablow at WUSA9.com:

Montgomery County Fire and Rescue have released the 9-1-1 call from Monday's amazing river rescue after a woman was thrown from her kayak on the Potomac.

We still don't know a lot about the woman, except for the fact that she's 31-years-old and lives in Woodbridge.

But Wednesday, we have a much better idea what she was going through when she was suddenly separated from her kayak on a fast-moving stretch of the Potomac near Dickerson, Md.

The call was made by a bird watcher who was standing on the banks of the river and saw the whole thing happen.

Listen to January 26 Military Road call

WTOP story

WTOP Radio’s Mark Segraves uncovered a 911 call from the January 26th storm in the District of Columbia that you should take the time to listen to in its entirety.  In it, the caller, Ellie Cossa, very patiently tries to direct the call taker for 14 minutes to get help to west bound Military Road between Beach Drive and 16th Street in Northwest Washington. That’s where a tree crushed a pick-up truck, killing a man and injuring a woman. This was Cossa’s second call to 911.

What happens in this call speaks directly to a recent conversation in our comments section at STATter911.com about Computer Aided Dispatch and the training of call takers and dispatchers. Despite a sign on Miltary Road pointing to Beach Drive, technically those two roads don’t intersect. So the call taker could not find it in the computer. 

Why can’t a call taker see what anyone with a Google Map can see? Is that a glitch in the system?

The roadways actually are connected via Joyce Road and Ross Drive. But Military Road goes over top Beach Drive traveling through Rock Creek Park. This is not some small thoroughfare in the District of Columbia. It is a major commuter route.

Ms. Cossa described the location well. Even providing a landmark (a golf course sign) and another major cross street to the east, 16th Street. Somehow, even after consulting the United States Park Police, no one could comprehend or immediately dispatch help to west bound Military Road between 16th Street and Beach Drive, NW. I am willing to bet that almost 100 percent of the firefighters and EMS personnel in the District of Columbia, from the fire chief on down, could be given that location and would have found the wreck instantly. Same with the police officers of the city.

Mark Segraves reports the 911 director believes the call taker did a good job and that this was a glitch in the system that will be corrected by new software.

With all due respect, I say bull!

What the motorist sees. Click the image for the Google Maps Street View tour.

This is a training issue. I give credit to the 911 call taker for staying calm and with Ms. Cossa and not showing any attitude or frustration. But is it too much to expect that a call taker or a dispatcher, or someone in the United States Park police, know a major thoroughfare like Military Road?

Even if they didn’t know this information couldn’t someone have listened to what Ms. Cossa clearly said, looked at a map and figured out that Military Road goes over top of Beach Drive? Any of us could use our phone or computer and have found out this information. Why can’t 911?

This isn’t a problem just in the District of Columbia. 911 centers all over the country have dealt with similar issues. The professionals in the business (and I used to be one before there was CAD) who I’ve talked with previously about this issue, agree this is about proper training.

But it isn’t just 911. It’s a problem throughout our digital lifestyle. It could be the food service industry, a department store  or even the news business. If all we expect of people to know about their jobs is what’s on the computer screen in front of them, then we have failed.

Emergency services must have  people who know their jobs (and in the case of 911, it’s knowing the community’s roads and landmarks) and can think for themselves when the flickering screen does not provide the answer.

Previous STATter911.com coverage here and here

A Pittsburgh paramedic fired after a snowstorm a year ago has been ordered reinstated by an arbitrator. Josie Dimon has been awarded 11 months of back pay, with the only punishment a three day suspension.

According to KDKA-TV’s Marty Griffin, the arbitrator finds the city was making Dimon a scapegoat and puts the blame for the poor response on the city’s public safety director.

This was the case of 50-year-old Curtis Mitchell of Hazelwood. His girlfriend called 911 10 times over 30 hours. By the time help arrived Mitchell was dead.

Here’s more in excerpts from KDKA-TV’s article:

In a recording, Dimon talks to another employee about an attempt to get to Curtis Mitchell’s home.

Dimon: “If he ain’t (expletive) coming down, I ain’t waiting all day for him, Kim. What the (expletive). This ain’t no cab service.”

The report will not be made public, but sources tell KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin it calls Dimon a “scape goat.”

The report also blames the incident and lack of response on the city and Public Safety Director Michael Huss.

“If they wish to blame me, that’s okay,” Huss said. “I got broad shoulders.”

The arbitrator also described Hazelwood as a scary neighborhood. That offended Huss.

“I travel through Hazelwood every day,” he said. “I think it’s a nice neighborhood. The people there have always treated myself and the other emergency responders that responded to those communities very well.”

Sources say the report calls the incident the “fiasco of 2010.” Sources say the report said Mitchell could have come towards the ambulance.

Sources also say the report says: “Josie Dimon’s livelihood can’t be wrangled away from her by dangling innuendo.”

In Colorado, a Denver TV station is looking closely at mutual aid agreements telling the public that the closest fire company may not respond in a life and death emergency when seconds count. KDVR-TV explains to the public the difference between automatic aid and mutual aid following an incident where a woman in the Golden Heights area of Golden called 911 saying she was trapped in the basement of her burning home.

West Metro Fire Station 6 is less than a mile away from the home. According to the TV station, firefighters from that station told West Metro not to respond to the emergency. The mutual aid agreement between the two departments requires a firefighter on the scene confirming there is a fire and the request has to be approved by a chief, a captain or lieutenant.

KDVR-TV reports Golden firefighters arrived in about eight minutes from stations 4.2 and 7.2 miles away. The woman’s husband apparently made the save before firefighters were on the scene.

Similar mutual aid agreements are in effect throughout the area. But the chief of the Cunningham Fire Department believes in automatic aid and has such agreements in place with Aurora Fire and South Metro. Here’s more from the station’s report: 

“Response time is the most important thing for the citizen,” Cunningham Fire Chief Jerry Rhodes told FOX 31. “Citizens don’t care what the name is on the side when their house is on fire. They want firefighters there in a hurry.”

Chief Rhodes thinks the closest fire department should respond no matter which district it’s in. He believes the community would be better served if all the metro area fire stations with a mutual aid system switched to an “auto aid agreement,” which means the closest fire department is automatically called.

But Denver Fire, West Metro Fire, and many other large fire departments defend the mutual aid agreement saying auto aid would take resources away from their cities and from the taxpayers who pay for fire protection.

“We have to be available for our citizens, not that we would ever turn down a request for mutual aid, but we don’t want have it to where it’s just an automatic,” West Metro Chief Doug McBee explained.

Golden’s Fire Chief also stands by the mutual aid system. He would not agree to an on camera interview, but sent us a statement which states, in part:

After reviewing response times for the (Golden Heights) incident, Golden Fire Department has directed a dispatch/response change…to include West Metro in the initial call for personnel. It states, On any reported structure fire in the Golden Heights area…Golden Dispatch shall immediately notify West Metro Dispatch…and…Pleasant View (Fire) to respond immediately after toning Golden Fire.

MSNBC has a timeline of the response to the shootings

More interviews with Northwest Fire District firefighters & medics

We are now hearing from the Northwest Fire District crew, the firefighters and medics first on the scene of the tragic Tucson shooting. Station 33 units were the first to arrive. The firefighter and medics initially staged for about three minutes waiting for the okay to enter from sheriff’s deputies. The incident commander was Battalion Chief Lane Spalla.

From KVOA.com:

The firefighters and the paramedics who responded say it was a chaotic scene.

“This particular incident happened rather fast fortunately we were well prepared, well trained.”

Tony Compagno began the triage process.

“In my head I had to prioritize and started directing people to those patients.”

Capt. Dustin Schaub of Station 31 describes the scene. “We saw lots of civilians running around they were trying to help the victims to the best of their ability.”

Fire officials say within in 45 minutes they had treated and sent to the hospital 13 patients.

Battalion Chief Spalla adds, from the 911 dispatchers, to the first responders to the hospitals it all just seemed that the stars were lined up to take care of these poor folks last Saturday.”

From KGUN-TV:

Firefighter Kyle Canty said:”Yeah I’m the engineer, I was driving the engine, I didn’t even put it in park, we just kinda kept creeping up, kept creeping up. One of the things I remember hearing I think from one of the guys in the back was we need to be in there we need to be first in there , let’s get in there.”

That let Paramedic Tony Compagno get to work. It was his job to triage everyone—determine the dead, assess the living and decide who will die first unless they get help right away.

He says just getting an accurate count was a challenge.

Two victims stood out as the ones to move first. A little girl we now know was Christina-Taylor Green, and a woman shot in the head, who was still breathing. That woman was Gabrielle Giffords. Getting her to the hospital alive was Colt Jackson’s assignment.

Jackson says, “I didn’t know she was a Congresswoman, once I was assigned a patient, so once I got on the scene, really, I treated her just as I needed to treat any other patient with the same training and the same throughtude as I would anybody else.”

The little girl, Christina Green was first in the ambulance and first on the way to the hospital. Based on her injuries, Gabrielle Giffords was next.

Paramedic Tony Compagno says, “Those were the two I would have wanted to go first and those were going to go in the helicopter but the people that were assigned to those patients did such a phenomenal job, they were ready to go before the helicopters got there and they made a quick decision and went.”