Copyright 2006 The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
All Rights Reserved
By ANDY PARAS
The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC)
WALTERBORO, S.C. — Had his radio sounded on the morning of June 12, Colleton County volunteer EMT Stoney Blanton could have helped save the life of Elaine Creel, a 62-year-old woman he had known since she was a girl.
Blanton lives about 1,500 feet from the house Creel shared with her husband John. But he wouldn’t find out until much later that John had called 911 at 4:22 a.m. because Elaine had stopped breathing.
“If dispatch had toned the right fire department out, I could have been there in two to three minutes,” Blanton said Thursday.
Instead, a miscommunication between the Sheriff’s Office dispatcher and John Creel within the first 30 seconds of the conversation sent ambulances 20 miles away on the other side of the county to a non-existent address, according to a 911 tape obtained by The Post and Courier.
An ambulance didn’t arrive at the Creels’ home until 36 minutes after John Creel made the 911 call. Elaine Creel was dead.
Blanton, 77, credits dispatchers for working a tough job but noted that
the county’s 911 system has always had problems.
“Our radio system up there, it stinks,” Blanton said. “It’s never been any good. We’ve got a radio problem and a dispatch problem, but we’ve always had problems.”
County leaders said Thursday that they are trying to make changes to a system that, according to documents obtained by The Post and Courier, have led to multiple delayed calls in the past year.
“The county is deeply concerned with the 911 system and how it works, as is the
sheriff,” County Administrator Doug Burns said.
Burns said the 911 system’s failure to tell dispatchers where a call is coming from has been a recurring problem, one that has popped up consistently even in the last three to four months.
It’s also a problem that contributed to the mistake in the Creel case nearly a year ago.
Even though Creel called from a landline, the caller’s address never showed up on the computer. The dispatcher sent ambulances to 209 Augusta Highway instead of 20908. “We want to find out why — if that’s an enhanced system — why is the address not coming on the screen from the get-go?” Burns said.
Burns said he and Sheriff George Malone have scheduled meetings with phone companies to make sure new phone numbers are being updated so they show up on the dispatcher’s monitors.
Chief Deputy Ted Stanfield said calls coming in without addresses happen in waves because numbers are not updated. But Stanfield wouldn’t say whether that was the culprit in the Creel case. He declined further comment, citing a lawsuit Creel has filed against the county.
Tony Harrison, president of the Oklahoma City-based Public Safety Group, which trains about 1,000 dispatchers a month from all over the country, said the average number of error calls — those without addresses — should be about 1 percent.
“It’s due to come up because you’re talking about thousands of calls a day,” he said. “The best thing (a dispatcher) can do is have the caller clearly state the address.”
Harrison said dispatchers should do so even when the address does appear on the monitor in case it’s not the right address.
Malone is also trying to update the 911 system. “Our system is not up to where it should be,” he said.
Earlier this week, Colleton County Council approved an $80,000 contract with a company that will update the current software.
Officials said the update will still not enable the dispatch center to map 911 calls but will provide a foundation for mapping at a later date. The county also has had a problem with turnover, which Harrison said is an industry-wide problem because of job stress and low pay.
Malone said he wants to get pay raises for dispatchers because they’re having a problem retaining some employees.
In Colleton County, the minimum starting salary for a dispatcher is $21,632 a year, or $10.40 an hour. The maximum salary a dispatcher can make is $30,311 a year.
County officials said the proposed budget for next year includes a 2 to 3 percent cost-of-living increase but will also address changing its compensation and class schedule.
Responding to critics, Malone denies that he dismissed any dispatchers when he took office in January 2005.
“A few people quit for personal reasons, but I have not dismissed anybody from dispatch,” he said.
Malone said employees have to be certified by the state and undergo recurring training. “It’s not like we just put somebody up there who we like to run that thing,” he said.
Also Thursday, the Sheriff’s Office allowed The Post and Courier to listen to the original 911 tape after it appeared that a copy was missing four minutes of audio. There were no noticeable differences. The discrepancy appears to have been moments of silence.