By David Hench and Dieter Bradbury
The Portland Press Herald (Maine)

GORHAM, Maine — Emergency officials believe calls to 911 went through without problems Tuesday morning when residents of The Friendly Village mobile home park called to report a fire that killed an elderly resident.

Officials are investigating reports that some people had difficulty calling the emergency line, but say preliminary findings indicate the system worked as intended and firefighters responded without undue delays.

Elinor Downes, 78, who used oxygen to help her breathe, died when a cigarette she was smoking ignited the oxygen, causing her clothes to catch fire, officials said. Firefighters found her body when they searched the home at 81 Evergreen Drive.

Gorham Fire Chief Robert Lefebvre said he heard second-hand that two people reported difficulties when calling 911 to report the fire.

The effectiveness of the 911 system has been the subject of public concern since the emergency lines at the Cumberland County Regional Communications Center stopped working for a time on Friday and again Saturday, forcing 911 calls to be shifted to the state police communications center in Gray. The county center handles 911 calls for 17 communities.

Officials with FairPoint Communications, the telephone company responsible for the county's 911 system, said Monday they believe a computer networking problem had caused seven system failures at the county call center since mid-April.

The computer system problems were exacerbated by delays in getting emergency calls routed to the state police. On Friday, calls to 911 went unanswered for about an hour.

The county blamed the delays on FairPoint, which assumed responsibility for the 911 system when it bought Verizon's assets in northern New England on March 31. Neither New Hampshire nor Vermont have had problems with 911 service, according to officials there.

FairPoint vowed Monday to fix the problems, and technicians worked through the night to install a switch so the county could automatically route 911 calls to the state police center when necessary. The state has ordered the county's 911 calls to continue to be handled by the Gray barracks until the original problems with the county dispatch center are completely diagnosed and fixed.

It's not clear whether knowledge of the county's 911 problems influenced the perception of the system's effectiveness Tuesday morning.

The state police center received its first 911 call about the fire at 7:09 a.m. and transferred the call over a regular business line to Cumberland County dispatchers, who directed firefighters to the double-wide mobile home. They arrived at 7:18 a.m. and had the fire under control in eight minutes, fire officials said.

William Holmes, director of the county communications center, said at least one caller who described making multiple attempts to report the fire actually was reacting to the system that is in place and was functioning correctly.

The woman, who was not identified, called 911 and was connected with the Gray barracks, which then transferred the call to a county dispatcher, he said. That dispatcher put the woman on hold while firefighters were notified and directed to the scene. The caller thought she was being transferred again at that point, Holmes said.

He said he could not definitively say there were no problems with the system until he had thoroughly researched all the complaints. A FairPoint representative said the company hadn't received any reports of 911 problems Tuesday morning.

Lefebvre at first wondered whether a flurry of calls might have overburdened one of the dispatch centers, but that was not the case, officials said.

State police in Gray received a total of three calls reporting the fire and transferred all three successfully to county dispatchers.

The Gray barracks has 16 lines dedicated to 911 calls and is staffed with five dispatchers. In the unlikely event all the lines were busy, the next call would automatically shift to the Augusta communications center, said Cliff Wells, the state's communications director.

Cumberland County has five lines dedicated to 911 and a minimum of four dispatchers. The county has never had a 911 call wait in line, Holmes said.

Lefebvre said the accidental fire was not immediately noticed by residents and probably had been burning about 30 minutes by the time fire crews arrived.

The park's community center is directly across the street from the fire scene, and property manager John Richard said a video security camera on the building recorded events that occurred Tuesday morning.

The video shows a man pounding on the door of Downes' home at 7:03 a.m. and the arrival of the first firefighters at 7:19 a.m., Richard said. He estimated that 12 minutes elapsed between the first 911 call and the arrival of fire trucks.

''So considering traffic and everything else, that's not a bad response time,'' he said.

Richard said he planned to share the video with authorities.

Downes moved into the park in 1995 and was well-known to residents in her section of Friendly Village. Her next-door neighbor, Scott Grass, said he occasionally mowed her lawn, painted shutters or did other chores.

He said he tried to keep an eye on his neighbor, and slowed down when he drove by her home Tuesday around 6:30 a.m. Downes was not sitting on her porch as she often did, and all the doors and windows were closed. Nothing seemed amiss, so Grass continued to his job at a convenience store on County Road, next to a Gorham fire station.

He heard the trucks roll out around 7 a.m., and later his wife called to tell him Downes' home had burned and that she was inside.

''It was a horrible shock,'' he said.

Grass described Downes as a friendly person who enjoyed visits from her son, but struggled to control a craving for cigarettes and didn't seem to heed warnings about the dangers of smoking near her oxygen.

She owned a dog, but firefighters did not find it inside the burned-out mobile home.

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