By Jeremy Boren and Timothy Puko
The Pittsburgh Tribune Review
ALLENGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — Steven Wells has spent his career helping people deliver babies, save gunshot victims and resuscitate swimmers.
The pressure to perform flawlessly is intense for 911 operators on shifts that can last up to 16 hours. Scrutiny increased after Allegheny County officials conceded in April that a part-time call-taker failed to tell Pittsburgh police officers responding to a domestic disturbance about guns in the house. Three officers died in the ensuing shootout.
“Things of that nature have heightened us to be more diligent to get more information,” said Wells, a 911 operator for 24 years. “The training ... needs to be on point. We can’t make any mistakes.”
The April 4 police killings in Stanton Heights sparked a review by the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, which found the Allegheny County 911 center did not meet the standard of reviewing 2 percent of calls each year.
Reducing mistakes
The center agreed last month to hire three quality assurance workers devoted to listening to and reviewing about 27,700 calls a year. Leaders have focused on responding to complaints and reducing mistakes while dealing with the same problems many centers in the nation face: aging technology and high staff turnover.
“Because of recent events, you have more people asking, ‘Is 911 safe? Is it reliable?’ ” said Rick Grejda, business agent for Local 668 of the Service Employees International Union, which represents the center’s 224 emergency operators.
“I’m here to tell you, Allegheny County 911 is absolutely 100 percent functional. It is a safe, reliable system.”
The center receives almost 1.4 million a calls a year and dispatches nearly 300 police, fire and EMS departments in Allegheny County. Last year, it got 104 complaints.
Among 145 written complaints reviewed by the Tribune-Review since 2005, there were 27 instances in which 911 supervisors disciplined dispatchers or call-takers, sought discipline against them or found they made serious errors.
Most of the complaints reviewed came through Pittsburgh’s 311 hot line. The 911 center receives many more complaints by phone, officials said, but the county did not provide those records.
In 2007, the first year the center recorded statistics of written and verbal complaints, there were 183. Of those, 95 were deemed reliable, and 88 were ruled unfounded. About half of last year’s complaints were ruled unfounded. There have been 51 complaints so far this year, 35 of them considered “founded.”
‘Lives in our hands’
Since the county and city 911 systems merged in 2005, the number of complaints has grown, but it represents a fraction of the calls the center handles, said Robert P. Harvey, 911 communications manager.
“People’s lives are in our hands. We take it very seriously, every mistake we make,” Harvey said. “The trend has gone up, and I think right now, it is leveling off. And I hope ... that trend starts coming down.”
The level of complaints appears to mirror those of other large 911 call centers.
The Metro Nashville system in Tennessee handled just more than 1 million calls in 2008. It reviewed 86 complaints. In 2007, there were 235 complaints.
An official with Metropolitan Emergency Services Board in Minnesota, said the 19 dispatch centers it oversees receive about 1.3 million calls a year and field a similar number of complaints to Allegheny County, but he couldn’t provide precise figures.
Complaints vary widely. The most common in Allegheny County is rude call-takers.
“The thing that bothered me the most was that they made me feel like I was bothering them,” said Rodney E. Garret Jr., 26, of New Eagle, who called 911 the night of Dec. 14 as he followed a drunken driver who repeatedly swerved into the wrong lane of Route 15. “One guy at 911 screamed at me to stop following him. And the police never showed up.”
In an e-mailed response, Harvey thanked Garret for his efforts and promised to “handle the employee in an appropriate manner.”
Allegheny County Sheriff’s Detective Richard L. Manning complained Jan. 14 that a 911 dispatcher ignored several attempts he made to contact her on a designated radio channel after the fugitive task force attempted to arrest someone in Arlington. When he called back to complain, the dispatcher put him on hold and then hung up on him.
“Unprofessional demeanor exhibited by a dispatcher affects the safety of all police officers utilizing the channel,” wrote Manning, who did not return a call seeking comment.
In a response Jan. 21, Harvey said the dispatcher acknowledged fault and would be disciplined.
Quality assurance praised
Allegheny County’s decision to hire quality assurance workers, combined with the success of its countywide merger of 911 systems, give it a good reputation, said Paul D. Linnee, an emergency communications consultant based in Minneapolis.
“It’s pretty rare to have dedicated staff to do quality assurance,” Linnee said. “I think they get a lot of credit for having any, much less hiring three more.”
Its prime challenges — aging technology and high staff turnover — are similar to those 911 centers across Pennsylvania face, said Robb Wentzel, Director of the Bureau of 911 Programs at the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency.
Every year about 20 to 25 operators leave, about 13 percent of the staff. It’s hard to retain recruits, Harvey said. And part-time workers leave most frequently.
“We ask a lot (from) those folks who answer 911 calls,” Wentzel said. Nationally, turnover rates can be as high as 20 percent, he added. “You know, we go to work, and we can have a bad day and get away with it. Them, if they have a bad day, that can end up on the front page of the newspaper above the fold. It’s a lot of pressure for those people.”
Part-time operators make up to $13.50 an hour. Full-time workers make between $18 and $21 an hour this year, and had a median gross last year of $33,590.52.
Ten were terminated this year, mostly part-time workers. Many leave within a couple weeks, because of the initial shock over the stressful work. That leaves the county with nothing in return for about $6,600 spent to train a worker, Harvey said.
Pressure to improve
Political pressure for improvements has increased since the April 4 shootings.
County Council’s Public Safety Chairman Jim Burn, D-Millvale, suggested the center consider using a computer program to put call-takers on a script for taking police and fire emergency calls, which the union opposes. County officials are considering the proposal.
They approved a $10 million overhaul of the center’s computer system. Five years after the city-county merger, computers at the Point Breeze center work on separate systems.
The city’s computers sit in the middle of the main room at the call center, and suburban computers and dispatchers, divided into three zones, line the outside of the room.
Each call-taker sits in front of three computer monitors. There are no ceiling lights and the blue glow of the monitors is virtually the only light in the room.
A 10-year-old computer system means county officials can’t get all data they’d like to have to evaluate staff, nor can they accurately use time log entries to determine response times, county officials said.
State regulations require 90 percent of calls to be answered within 10 seconds, according to PEMA. Call-takers must verify the location of the incident, the caller’s phone number, and the nature of the emergency within 60 seconds 90 percent of the time.
County officials want the standard changed, saying it isn’t effective.
PEMA’s review last month did not report the county missing the mark for answering calls within 10 seconds, but county officials believe they answer every call within 10 seconds.
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