By Don Wilkins
Messenger-Inquirer
OWENSBORO, Ky. — The joint city-county 911 center receives from 80,000 to 90,000 calls a year.
Although the bulk are English speaking, there are numerous calls that come in each month that are not.
Paul Nave, director of the 911 center, said the 911 center doesn’t employ any bilingual dispatchers who can translate common languages such as Spanish.
Instead, he said, the 911 center contracts with a 24-hour Language Line, which can translate 150 languages in seconds.
“We’ve had the Language Line for about 15 years now,” Nave said. “The initial usage of it was for Spanish. We had very few other languages.”
But in that time, the demographics have changed with other nationalities making Owensboro home.
Within the past five years, there has been an influx of Burmese and Somali refugees resettled to the city.
“We are totally dependent on this service during an emergency,” Nave said. “It really excites me that we have this because, when you’re in an emergency, what do you always default to? Your primary language. It’s so difficult when you’re stressed to remember a new language.”
According to 911 center records, 39 non-English emergency calls were received from July through September of this year.
Those calls tallied to 291 minutes. Out of that total, 202 minutes were Spanish, 71 minutes were Burmese, 12 minutes were Karen and 6 minutes were Korean.
Nave said Language Line 911 calls do take slightly longer than the normal 911 calls.
“It does slow down our response because of the barrier,” Nave said. “And that’s just something difficult to overcome. But we do have the one-button transfer so within 10 to 15 seconds we can have the interpreter on the line with us. It’s not a delay in that aspect but the delay is getting the information from the caller.”
Out of the $2.3 million 911 budget, $2,500 is set aside for the Language Line.
Nave said it costs $1.50 a minute for common languages and $2.50 per minute for those languages uncommon in the United States.
”...A minute can mean the difference between life and death,” Nave said. “We look for people (to hire) who can speak different languages. We would welcome them as long as they could pass the background check and do the job.”
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