By Rhonda Cook
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ATLANTA — One dispatcher should not be blamed for the death of a woman whose call for help took 25 minutes to answer, the medical director for Grady Memorial Hospital ambulance service said Wednesday.
Eric Ossman said the Fulton County death of Darlene Dukes is an indictment on an emergency call center that has long suffered mismanagement, short staffing and inadequate training.
Fulton, he said, was trying to make fired operator the “scapegoat.”
“She’s like the last piece of the puzzle,” Ossman said. “Unfortunately, this poor woman has been terminated. She has been categorized as being at the root of all this. In reality, these issues were happening in the communications center at Fulton County long before this woman. This is not about one bad employee. ... This one poor woman is not responsible for all this.”
The Saturday afternoon distress call from Dukes’ cellphone came to the county’s emergency center, bouncing off a cellphone tower outside Atlanta, yet a call-taker dispatched a Grady ambulance. Grady only answers ambulance calls inside Atlanta while Rural/Metro Ambulance handles calls north and south of the city.
“The phone [call] hit a cell tower that was 27 miles away from the address that they dispatched Grady EMS and [Atlanta] fire [department] to,” Ossman said.
Dukes, 39, died Saturday afternoon of a blocked artery. The operator dispatched crews to Wells Street in Atlanta even though Dukes was calling from her home on Wales Street in Johns Creek north of Atlanta.
The operator stayed on the line with Dukes for 25 minutes waiting for the ambulance to arrive. The mother of two fell silent 17 minutes into the call and the operator spent the remaining eight minutes imploring Dukes to respond, Alfred “Rocky” Moore, Fulton’s 911 director, said Tuesday.
Moore said the operator misheard the address spoken by Dukes, who was “in respiratory distress.”
Moore said the operator was fired because she should have noticed the call came from a cell tower in north Fulton County, not Atlanta.
Moore did not return phone calls Wednesday. He also declined to talk to a reporter in person.
Fulton released a recorded statement in which Moore and County Manager Zachary Williams answered questions from an unidentified person, simulating a meeting with reporters. Both stressed several times “this was an isolated case” and emergency call center employees are trained with safeguards in place to prevent this from happening again.
“We want the citizens to understand and be confident in the 911 system,” Moore said. “Our employees are trained properly. They answer millions of calls a year.” At the same time, reports of Duke’s death brought calls to Fulton County Wednesday from various national media organizations, including “Good Morning America” and “Dr. Phil.” And people claiming to be former dispatchers wrote their thoughts on Internet blogs, some pleading for understanding of the job the operator was doing and others pointing out that Dukes’ death was the result of a system failure.
Dukes’ family, in Atlanta from New York, found out about the delay from reporters rather than from the county. They were angry.
“My child would be alive today if they had responded timely?” mother Ida Dukes said.
According to Ossman and the head of the state’s training program for 911 center operators and dispatchers, one person takes calls to the 911 center and handles only one call at a time. All the while, they are typing information that goes in real time to a dispatcher, who sometimes handles more than one call.
In this case, Ossman suspects the operator was doing double duty. “I’m fairly certain she was pursuing both roles at the time that it happened,” Ossman said.
The problem with Dukes’ call was discovered when an operator in the Grady center “googled the name of the apartments and figured they were ... not in southwest Atlanta,” Ossman said
The city of Johns Creek said a Rural Metro ambulance reached Dukes three minutes after it was dispatched.
The prevalence of cellphones has complicated responding to emergencies.
Elaine Sexton, the 911 program administrator for the Georgia Emergency Management Agency, said the addresses for telephone land lines are displayed for operators answering calls to 911 centers. Cellphone location also can be displayed but not specifically and it also depends on the individual phone’s technology, physical location of the caller, the cellular service and the county’s technology. In some cases the operator will know the latitude and longitude and in others it will show the location between cell towers.
“With cellular calls, the location is not automatic,” Sexton said.
Ossman declined to blame technology. “These issues with [Fulton County] communications have been brewing for a decade,” he said. “Call centers deal with 911 cellphone calls all day. These aren’t rare.”
Staff writer Marcus Garner contributed to this article.