You would like to think the person who answers your call will, no matter how excited you are, walk you through giving the correct information to get emergency vehicles quickly on the way to the problem.
So it was deeply unsettling that a 911 call to Durham’s Emergency Communications Center went badly awry.
When a neighbor spotted flames at a home at 110 Shantercliff Place, she called the emergency number. In the ensuing conversation, the 911 operator appeared to have difficulty understanding the caller, even though the caller spelled slowly the name of the street.
Still, the dispatcher misunderstood, and sent firefighters to a similar-sounding street in South Durham, clear across town from the actual fire. Over 4½ minutes passed before the confusion was discovered and fire units dispatched to the correct North Durham address.
Marvin Jacobs died in the fire at his home, found by firefighters just a few feet from a door to his home when they finally arrived and began fighting the fire. Would he have survived had help arrived sooner? Hard to tell.
But what was clear, when Emergency Communications Center officials investigated, was that the dispatcher failed to follow center procedures. She failed, center Director James Soukup said last week, to keep the caller on the phone and to ask follow-up questions to help nail down the correct address.
“She should have asked for intersections,” Soukup explained. “She could have asked if this is North Durham or South Durham — something to narrow it down.”
There were complications. The caller was using a computer phone system that the 911 equipment did not identify. With the proliferation of cell phones and computer “voice-over-Internet” phone lines, that’s a challenge for emergency services. But the Durham center operators are trained to work around that.
Soukup made what seems the only decision he could – the operator in the Shantercliff Place call was fired.
Harsh, yes, but the necessary action to assure the public that the emergency center – which generally does a fine job – is serious about safeguarding the public.
