By Steve Jones
The Sun News
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. — The 911 dispatcher who fielded the first reports of the house fire that claimed the lives of seven college students is now receiving threatening calls for her handling of the blaze, her supervisor said Tuesday.
Tom Rogers, deputy director of the county’s Emergency Services who oversees the call center, said he does not believe the call was mishandled.
He declined to name the dispatcher, but said she’d been with the department for three or four years.
The dispatcher asked several times for a specific address on Scotland Street on Ocean Isle Beach, saying once that she was not familiar with the area.
A fuzzy cell phone transmission or ambient noise in the call center from a sudden heavy volume of calls about the fire may have made it hard for the dispatcher to understand the address the caller was trying to give her, Rogers said.
That call came 50 seconds after 7 a.m. Sunday: The Ocean Isle Beach Fire Department was dispatched about 30 seconds later.
The dispatcher began entering information about the fire in the call center’s computer within a second of answering the first call, according to records of activity that morning.
Within a couple of minutes, 19 more calls came in about the fire, several of them about people believed trapped in the burning house and one telling of people in the house screaming.
Four fire departments and several rescue squads were dispatched within five minutes, with a fifth unit called two minutes later.
The call volume was so heavy that all five dispatchers were answering the calls, Rogers said. While one was answering a call, another was dispatching units.
People who read the transcripts or heard the tape have called the dispatcher at work to tell her she is incompetent and shouldn’t have a job, he said. “She’s very upset.”
Rogers has only had time to briefly review the call logs because of the number of local, regional and national media calling for information, he said. But from what he’s seen, he’s confident things were handled as they should have been.
On Sunday, the dispatchers started their shifts at 6 a.m., and all worked their normal 12 hours.
Brunswick’s 911 center employees get 47 hours of training developed by the N.C. Justice Academy before they start their first shift as dispatchers, Rogers said.
According to the academy’s Web site, the employees are probationary for a year while they take another 60 hours of training to become certified.
Keeping the certification takes 16 hours of annual training.
While dispatchers are trained to remain dispassionate during emergency calls, those calls can be hard to handle and will sometimes cause dispatchers to break down after the stress of the incident has passed.
That has not happened with the crew on the job Sunday, he said, and all have refused offers of counseling.
Still, Rogers said that getting calls about people screaming in a burning house is not easy.
“Those are hard calls when you’re in the center,” he said. “Those [dispatchers] are strong individuals.”
Copyright 2007 The Sun News
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