By Tom Fontaine
The Pittsburgh Tribune Review
ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — The Allegheny County Emergency Services Department suspended a dispatcher and is investigating at least two others for errors handling recent 911 calls, including two incidents in which people died, a department official said Tuesday.
County Executive Dan Onorato said through a spokeswoman he is “obviously concerned” about the mistakes. He attributed them to human errors inputing addresses, not flaws with the computer-aided dispatch system the county spent $10 million upgrading.
The department’s training procedures will be reviewed, and dispatchers could undergo retraining, Onorato’s office said.
“Every error ticks me off. Our job is to save lives, not make things worse,” county 911 coordinator Bob Harvey said.
“But we have human beings here. We can’t be perfect in all 1.4 million calls,” he said, referring to the number of emergency calls the department handles each year. Last year, the department received 104 complaints.
“If we terminated everybody that made a mistake, we wouldn’t have anyone to work,” Harvey said.
Although the computer upgrade failed to include thousands of landmarks’ names in the system when it came online Aug. 8, several high-profile mistakes have occurred since that officials linked to human error. Officials would not disclose the identities of any dispatchers.
Most recently, a county 911 operator’s errors led to a 52-second delay in dispatching firefighters to a house fire Sunday in McKees Rocks that claimed the life of an 84-year-old woman.
Although the person who alerted 911 about the fire reported that it was on Ella Street in McKees Rocks, the dispatcher entered into the computer system that it was occurring on Ella Street in Pittsburgh, Harvey said. The error was fixed before Pittsburgh firefighters were dispatched, but it took more than four minutes from the time the call came in to dispatch McKees Rocks firefighters.
It was unclear whether the delay played a role in the woman’s death.
“Any call should be dispatched in two minutes or less,” Harvey said. He said the department is looking into the McKees Rocks case but has taken no action involving the dispatcher.
Also Sunday, a 911 operator received a call at 1:42 a.m. that a man suffered a heart attack at the Doubletree Hotel at 1 Bigelow Square, Downtown. Medics were sent to Bigelow Boulevard in Oakland. As medics drove there, Harvey said, EMS and 911 dispatchers began to doubt there was a Room 1602 at that address, so they also sent a crew Downtown.
A crew arrived in Oakland 11 minutes after the first call came in, and a crew arrived Downtown a minute later.
Harvey said he was told unofficially that the heart attack victim died. It’s unclear whether dispatch problems played a role in the man’s death. The county Medical Examiner’s Office said a man was pronounced dead at the Doubletree at 2:37 a.m., with the cause listed as cardiovascular disease.
The same dispatcher who handled the Doubletree call mistakenly sent police Aug. 29 to the address of a cell phone tower instead of a Marshall-Shadeland residence where a break-in reportedly was occurring, Harvey said. The break-in report turned out to be unfounded, but it took more than three minutes to sort out the address problem.
That dispatcher was suspended indefinitely, pending the outcome of an investigation and hearing that Harvey believes could be completed within two weeks.
Rick Grejda, business agent for Local 668 of the Service Employees International Union, said the suspended dispatcher told him that he had been placed on leave. Grejda said he had not received documentation from management outlining the mistakes the dispatcher is accused of making. The union plans to meet with management sometime this week, he said.
The pressure to get it right has always been intense for dispatchers, Harvey said. Public scrutiny intensified last year when officials conceded that a part-time call-taker failed to tell Pittsburgh police responding to a domestic disturbance in Stanton Heights that there were weapons in the house. Three police officers were killed in the ensuing shootout.
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