I call BS: Another 911 failure blamed on technology instead of training

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The news story above is pissing me off. It’s from WXIA-TV in Atlanta. It’s about a woman calling 911 while trapped in her SUV as it sank in a Cherokee County, Georgia pond. The woman died while waiting for help. Help that was delayed many minutes because 911 call takers didn’t know her location.

Like reporter Brendan Keefe, the news anchors and the victim’s mother I am outraged that help was delayed. I even agree with Keefe’s statement that “the system is broken”. But, as you watch the story, you will discover Keefe and everyone else involved strongly believe the system is broken because of technology.  They are wrong. This is a people issue. Anyone who tells you otherwise isn’t being honest about a serious problem in Georgia and all across our country.

The 911 call taker in Alpharetta, in northern Fulton County, didn’t have a clue where the woman on the other end of the line was calling from. But 31-year-old Shanell Anderson knew exactly where she was despite the water rapidly rising in her SUV. Ms. Anderson had run off a road into a pond and provided her location in a very clear and relatively calm voice. Shanell Anderson said, “The Fairway off of Batesville”. Anderson even gave the ZIP Code.

As soon as I heard the 911 call, I paused the video and put that information into Google maps. It showed me this call was located in Woodstock, Georgia in neighboring Cherokee County. It took me about five seconds to get that information.

Continuing to watch the story, I was pleased to see Brendan Keefe had the same instinct. He also put the address into Google with the very same results. But here is where we part ways and the BS begins.

Keefe, supported by those in charge of the 911 center in Alpharetta, blamed all of this on the cell towers routing the call to the wrong county and the GPS on our smart phones not transmitting location information to 911. That was not the problem with this call.

In the story, we here the call taker saying to Ms. Anderson, “It’s not working” or “Fairway? I don’t have that”. What we don’t hear is the question — five simple words — that might have made the difference between life and death for Shanell Anderson: “What county are you in?”

What should have happened is a very simple procedure. If the call taker couldn’t find “The Fairway off of Batesville” in the database for her jurisdiction or knew the jurisdiction well enough to know that information, she should have asked “What county are you in?”

If she got the answer “Fulton County”, the call could have been immediately transferred and help dispatched. If Ms. Anderson didn’t know the correct county, there was already enough information (as reporter Keefe and I have proven) to immediately find out the jurisdiction and quickly route the call.

Why do I know this and apparently people at current 911 centers struggle with this problem? It’s because I was a fire department dispatcher back in the 1970s. That was a time before computer aided dispatch. Despite that, I did have a computer at the ready. It was an indispensable tool. It was called “the brain”.

Yes, I and countless other dispatchers of that era used our brains to learn information about the jurisdiction where we worked. We even learned about neighboring jurisdictions. We also weren’t trained to rely solely on a piece of machinery to do all of the thinking for us.

I ranted about this very same issue over a 911 call in our Nation’s Capital four-years-ago. It was also a case of the call taker unable to process what wasn’t on her computer screen and taking all of the wrong steps to find out where the person was located. The head of DC’s 911 center said it was a “glitch” in the computer system. Just another administrator in denial or refusing to be honest about the real problem (read the story here).

Yes, as the WXIA-TV story says, it would be nice if the call went to the right 911 center in the first place. Yes, it would be nice if the GPS information was on display in front of the call taker. But what would really be nice is to properly train those in 911 centers in both procedures and critical thinking skills to handle emergencies where the answer doesn’t immediately pop up on the screen in front of them. Teach them to use the computer they were born with.

And it would be even nicer if those in charge stopped blaming these failures on technology when it’s really a people problem. If you really believe technology is why Shanell Anderson isn’t with us today, you are part of the problem.