Confusion Delays Crews to House Fire (PRAYERS REQUESTED

I have a feeling that, when they called 9-1-1 and THEN the dispatch center itself, they were QUITE clear with their address.

That's certainly possible, and I certainly sympathize with their trauma. However, the side they saw of the situation may not necessarily provide all of the information required to get an accurate picture of what happened.

For example: the article indicates they called 911 several times and got no answer. Small area dispatch centers generally have only a few people on duty at any given time, and usually have more 911 trunks than they have people to answer them. In some jurisdictions, the overflow calls go to a "please hold on" message. (Yes, believe it or not, your house is burning down and you're on hold.) In other jurisdictions, the lines just continue to ring until a dispatcher can get to them. Calling and hanging up repeatedly simply puts you back at the top of the que.

But, what the "no answer" situation probably indicates is that the center was already receiving calls from the neighbors. This, too, is quite common. So, it's possible that they got an incorrect address from one neighbor and a correct address from another neighbor, or it's also possible that there were two simultaneous incidents in similar sounding locations. This happens more often than you might imagine.

At any rate, if we assume the story is accurate, your friends never got through to 911. So, it appears that the dispatchers, confronting a disparity in locations, chose to go to the source and called the house that was allegedly on fire to confirm that they were sending equipment to the right address.

My gripe, at any rate is with the story, which appears to contain a number of assumptions that probably aren't true, and at any rate are examples of assumptions not facts. To wit:

1. Because the residents couldn't get a quick answer on 911, the fire wasn't being reported.

2. Equipment wasn't dispatched before the "is your house on fire" call.

3. The confusion about addresses was something the dispatchers created.

Just as a matter of information, the new computer aided dispatch systems require a considerable amount of information to be input before the dispatch can occur. One of the things that needs to be verified is the address. As a rule, the address visible to the dispatcher when you call 911 is provided by the phone company, and the data is sometimes wrong. So, taking time to verify is necessary.

At night, a good standard for normal response delay from the time 911 answers your call to the time the equipment leaves the station is on the order of two and a half minutes. Then you add to that the drive time. Meanwhile, when you're on the other end waiting, every second seems like an hour. It is very routine to recieve complaints that it took fifteen minutes for the the fire trucks to arrive only to pull the logs and discover that the actual time was something like four minutes.

So, I guess I'm just saying that I wouldn't buy at face value the one-sided story of a sensation-seeking reporter who obviously hasn't taken any time to verify the facts. Let's wait 'til we have them first.

Just MHO.

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