GRAND ISLAND, NE — Communication barriers are a fact of life in Grand Island, where one-fifth of the population older than 5 speaks a language other than English at home.

But in a state of emergency, minutes and seconds lost in translation could be the difference between life and death.

Of Grand Island’s 63 street-level firefighters and paramedics, one is bilingual in Spanish. Grand Island’s 77-officer police force includes about 10 officers certified bilingual in Spanish and one officer certified in Laotian.

Grand Island’s lone bilingual 911 dispatcher, Shanna Andrade, estimated she uses her Spanish skills 10 to 15 times a week. The center used the language line, a translation service to handle irreconcilable language barriers over the phone, about once daily last year, almost exclusively for Spanish.

Emergency Management Director Jon Rosenlund called a language barrier a “speed bump” that can delay the emergency response process from the get-go. The challenges begin the moment one of the 15 dispatchers answers the 911 call. Valuable seconds and minutes are wasted as the dispatcher attempts to communicate with the caller and identify the most important pieces of information: the location of the call and the type of emergency.

Andrade described dealing with a language barrier over the phone as a “state of pause.”

“You’re kind of helpless at that point,” she said.

Rosenlund said dispatchers attempt to handle language barriers themselves, relying on cognates and common words, but they resort to the language line if communication proves impossible. The service, which costs 87 cents a minute, puts a translator on the line with the dispatcher and the caller.

According to department records, dispatchers used the service 369 times last year: 361 times for Spanish and one to three times each for Arabic, Amharic, Mandarin, Somali and Vietnamese. Rosenlund called the language line “a must,” but he admitted it has its drawbacks.

“(Emergency units’) response time is three or four minutes,” Rosenlund said. “It’ll take me two and a half minutes just to start the conversation. I could talk to them all day long and get every detail in the world. But if it takes me eight minutes to get responders there, it probably won’t matter.”

The difficulties don’t end once emergency personnel are on the scene, however. Police Chief Steve Lamken said language barriers also can impede accurate investigations.

“If it’s a crisis emergency, that is the worst time to have language barriers,” Lamken said. “We want to get the right information and make the right decisions.”

And in a medical emergency, language barriers present potentially harmful inefficiencies when patients are unable to communicate their injuries.

“If we spend a lot of our time trying to figure out what they’re talking about, they’re probably not getting treated as well as if they were speaking the common language,” Emergency Medical Services Division Chief Russ Blackburn said.

Blackburn told the story of a 1999 trailer fire on South Sylvan Street to epitomize the negative effects of language barriers. A woman returned home to her trailer near Barr Middle School to find firefighters battling a blaze that destroyed the unit and killed her 2 1/2-year-old son. If not for language barriers between the caller and dispatcher as well as the woman and the firefighters, Blackburn said, the boy might have been saved.

In the summer of 2003, a semi-tractor trailer hit a van holding four visitors from Korea. One woman was ejected from the van and sent to the hospital, where she died. Reports of the accident described a language barrier between the van passengers and the emergency responders. Early reports of the incident erroneously identified the passengers as U.S. citizens.

And on May 11, a minor car accident resulted in three ambulances and five patients being sent to the hospital because personnel on scene couldn’t communicate with any of the passengers to identify their injuries.

Emergency personnel generally depend on community members to transcend language barriers. Children, friends and neighbors often have some English skills when the patients or original callers do not, Lamken said.

“A lot of people understand their limitations and provide their own interpreters,” he said.

Some medical emergencies — unconsciousness, shortness of breath, heart failure — are more visual than verbal. Regardless, firefighter and paramedic Jedd Bohlender said he and others have developed a working knowledge of basic phrases in Spanish. Bohlender has learned to rely on anything that might provide important information: hand gestures, driver’s licenses, pill bottles — even smartphones.

As of late, Bohlender said, some firefighters and paramedics have taken to using Google Translate and other smartphone applications to communicate with patients. But Bohlender called the use of the services “iffy” due to dialects and the need for strong phone reception.

“It’s a technology crutch,” he said.

Lamken, Rosenlund and Fire Operations and Training Division Chief Tim Hiemer said their departments try to recruit people who are bilingual, particularly in Spanish.

“I don’t care if they’re unemployed; I don’t care whether they’re experienced,” Rosenlund said. “If they say, ‘I speak Spanish,’ or another language, that’s enough for me to bring them in to test them. We’re actively pushing for more Spanish-speakers.”

But Hiemer said bilingual recruitment is easier said than done.

“There’s just not that many people around here that are dual-language,” he said.

The Police Department has offered training sessions in the past for basic Spanish, and the city offers a $1,000 annual incentive to those who are certified bilingual in any language, meaning they can take and pass a rigorous language test. No one in the Fire Department has passed the test.

“When it comes to learning another language, cash generally isn’t sufficient to make you want to do it,” Rosenlund said.

Lamken said it’s difficult to recruit bilingual officers because the bilingual population often consists of recent immigrants who may not meet the qualifications to become an officer: 11th grade English language skills, reading and writing capabilities and U.S. citizenship.

“As generations evolve, our opportunities are going to increase greatly. But right now we’re sort of in that catch-22 period,” Lamken said.

In the future, Lamken said, he hopes to attain modern translation technology for officers.

“I just don’t know how fast or when we can afford technology like that,” he said. “There’s cost barriers.”

Other communities with large non-English-speaking populations face challenges similar to Grand Island, officials said. About 64 percent of Lexington residents older than 5 years speak a language other than English at home, according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Fifty-eight percent of Schuyler residents are in the same category, as are 40 percent of those in South Sioux City. The statewide rate is about 10 percent, and Grand Island’s is 21 percent.

“Big towns, small towns — everybody has this challenge,” Rosenlund said.

He added that the transience of immigrant populations makes language barriers difficult to surmount.

“As soon as you begin to tool yourself to meet the needs of Vietnamese or Laotians, then a lot of those community members leave and are supplanted by another group,” he said. “You’ll always be several years behind the next wave of languages.”

Read the story here.

From June, operators in England will get an extra 60 seconds before they need to dispatch crews to serious but non-life-threatening callouts.

Trials showed the extra time meant fewer double dispatches, where two crews are sent, freeing up resources.

This in turn meant the crews could get to the patient more quickly.

To date it has been standard practice to send two crews, to ensure there are enough staff on hand to deal with cases and to ensure the patient is reached quickly.

Eight-minute target

But by gathering more information before dispatch, the pilots showed improvements could be made without harming the overall response time.

Under the system, the most serious calls – category A – will be split into two groups.

Life-threatening cases where somebody has had a cardiac arrest or is unconscious and not breathing will be known as Red One.

Crews still have to be sent immediately to these calls.

But for the rest of the category A calls – Red Two – operators will get up to 60 seconds to decide what sort of response should be sent.

The overall target for reaching the patient will stay at eight minutes for all category A calls.

During the pilots held in London and the West Midlands, the new system reduced the number of vehicles sent out – because of fewer double dispatches – and cut the number of cancellations when vehicles were en route.

It also meant that patients were reached more quickly for both Red One and Two cases as there were more crews available.

Peter Bradley, the national ambulance director, said: “Making this small change will mean more ambulances and rapid responders will be ready to go and help patients – rather than be stood down while on their way to somewhere they aren’t needed.”

Read the story here.

GOSHEN, UT — It has been two months since Goshen resident Orville Gerow suffered a massive heart attack in his home, but the retired nurse is still counting his blessings that he is alive to tell his story today.

Gerow had just returned home on the afternoon of March 14 after getting a hot dog and a drink at the local convenience store when he began to get what he described as heartburn. He took an antacid and drank some milk but nothing alleviated the burning. In fact, the pain in his chest continued to get worse.

“I knew I was in trouble, so I decided to call 911,” Gerow said. “I got the busy signal four or five times. I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t remember my wife’s cell phone number and I was having so much pain and couldn’t move to look up any other numbers.”

Luckily for Gerow he remembered the old dispatch number from his days working in the ER at Mountain View Hospital and within just a few minutes an ambulance was on its way. He was later told his heart stopped in his own driveway as he was being transported to the hospital.

Once Gerow got through to a dispatcher it was less than an hour before a stent was being put in the blocked portion of his heart. Dr. Joseph Dinkins, ER doctor at Mountain View, said it was roughly 25 minutes from the time Gerow arrived at the hospital to having the stent placed, which is about a third of the national 90-minute requirement. Dinkins said even with the fast response Gerow is lucky to be alive.

“The vast majority of people in his condition would not be leaving the hospital alive,” Dinkins said. “He had a completely occluded artery that stimulated his heart to go into fibrillation. It was quivering and not pumping anything, which means without CPR or being shocked back into a rhythm within five or six minutes there is brain damage rapidly followed by death.”

While Gerow’s story has a happy ending, had it been another resident of Goshen calling 911 that day the story might have a different ending. In the weeks following Gerow’s heart attack both Utah Valley Dispatch and CentraCom, the telephone company that provides service to Goshen, have been investigating what caused the busy signal that day.

According to Deborah Mecham, executive director of Utah Valley Dispatch, no other 911 calls were coming into dispatch at the time Gerow called, meaning all lines should have been open and ready for use.

Mecham said all of their 911 lines are monitored by CenturyLink to make sure all systems are up and running. She said CenturyLink usually knows a line is out well before dispatch does, but an investigation has shown that wasn’t the case this time.

“The circuit for Goshen was down that day and we don’t know why,” said Spencer Cox, Vice President of CentraCom. “That is the missing link. We still don’t know why CenturyLink didn’t let us know the line was down.”

Cox said their calls to CenturyLink have so far gone unreturned, but since the incident several layers of protection have been put in place to avoid having the same problem in the future. Cox said in the past Goshen was the only town they serviced that didn’t have a back-up system in case something went wrong. Cox said in Dugway, for example, that same 911 call would have rolled over to Wendover or Eureka to find a connection. That back-up system has now been installed in Goshen as well.

Mecham said the same back-up system is in place at Utah Valley Dispatch as well.

“If all of our lines our busy the calls coming in would rollover to Provo dispatch and if Provo is maxed out it rolls over to Orem,” Mecham said. “There is an end to the back-up, but there would have to be a lot of calls coming in for someone to get a busy signal because of no available lines”

CentraCom also has started companywide tests of their 911 lines every few weeks to ensure problems like this one don’t go unnoticed until there is an emergency.

“We don’t know how long that line had been down but within five minutes after we were notified it was up and running again,” Cox said. “We are just grateful that everything ended well and that we had an opportunity to add some layers of security to make sure it never happens again.”

Gerow said he hopes something like this never happens again and that he is just thankful he remembered the dispatch number.

“If the EMS people hadn’t got here within the time frame they did,” Gerow said, choking up. “I would not have been alive 15 minutes later.”

Read the story here.

Officials at the North Georgia Health District say they have confirmed five cases of rabies so far this year, including a rabid raccoon found in Dalton last month.

So what do you do if you encounter an animal you think may be rabid?

Obviously, don’t approach the animal. Instead, call 911.

“Whether it is a dog or a wild animal, let them know about it. They will direct them (the caller) to the right services or call them themselves and get people on the way to handle it,” said Whitfield County Sheriff’s Office Maj. John Gibson.

While the sheriff’s office handles animal control, Gibson says its officers don’t handle wild animals.

“We aren’t trained to handle wild animals. The animal control division of the sheriff’s office strictly picks up dogs,” he said. “If it’s an emergency situation we will help until we can get somebody there that can handle it. But we don’t have the expertise or equipment. We normally call the Department of Natural Resources and the state people.”

Don Allen Garrett, director of the Whitfield County Animal Shelter, says he gets frequent calls about potentially rabid wild animals. But he says that unless there has been contact with a human or a pet there’s little he can do.

“We just don’t have the resources to go out on every call. There are too many of them,” he said.

Dalton resident Susan Moore says she found that out last month when she spotted a sick raccoon in her garage. She says she called county officials to report the raccoon’s suspicious behavior and was told that since there was no evidence it had bitten anyone it would not be retrieved.

Moore said after the raccoon died two days later, she again contacted the county and was told “to dispose of the deceased raccoon in a Dumpster.”

She says she called several agencies for help before the Whitfield County Health Department put her in touch with a wildlife biologist from the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“He was at my home within 30 minutes,” she said.

Odin Stephens of the USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) Wildlife Services came for the dead raccoon and tested it for rabies, reporting to county environmental health officials that the results were positive.

Read the story here.

Lindsay Ryan Anthony was born deaf.

“My mother discovered I was deaf at nine months old and I’ve lived in Syracuse my whole life,” Lindsay explained.

Being deaf didn’t stop her from going to the Rochester Institute of Technology and Cayuga College for her social work degree, but it has stopped her from being able to call 911.

“To be able to text 911 and to have the opportunity to go back and forth with the dispatcher, it’d be so much easier than relying on a hearing person to call for me,” Lindsay continued.

Michael Mazzaroppi agrees. His hearing gets worse every year. He’s in his forties and can’t hear without hearing aids. He says it’s very difficult to hear people on the phone.

“I have a nephew now who’s 14 months old and I’ve often wondered if I needed to call 911 while I’m babysitting, would I have to run to the neighbors to call 911?” Mazzaroppi said.

Neither Michael nor Lindsay would be able to answer dispatcher questions.

At the Onondaga County 911 call center, calls can be processed in just under two minutes. Details are not known about how the text messages would be processed, but they’re excited about the implementation of the service.

“We’re very excited because that offers an alternative way to access emergency services and we look forward to the opportunity. We’re still waiting to hear the details of that and how it might be implemented here at the center,” Onondaga County Emergency Communications Commissioner, William Bleyle told NewsChannel 9.

Deaf community members say as long as communication companies are working towards texting 911 services, it’s a step in the right direction.

“Texting has been our priority means of communication for a while now. And so, to be able to call 911 using texting will be so wonderful,” Lindsay said.

Lindsay calls it a tool for empowerment and says it’s about time

Bleyle says the next generation of 911 services will include not only texting, but video and picture sending abilities as well. He hopes the service will be available in Onondaga County within the next couple of years.

Read the story here.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office released an edited version of a consultants’ report on Friday. His administration is fighting legal efforts to force it to release earlier versions. When the New York Post first wrote about the report last month, it described a 216-page document, but the version released Friday had 133 pages.

Cas Holloway, the deputy mayor for operations, said the city would immediately adopt two of the report’s 14 recommendations and would soon adopt others. Bloomberg will create a working group to consider the report’s suggestions and will issue an executive order establishing an ongoing process to improve the system, Holloway said.

The deputy mayor argued that, while the report had exposed weaknesses in the call system, the city’s overall response to emergencies had improved.

“Public safety response, I think it’s safe to say, is better than it’s ever been,” he said. “Fire deaths are at an all-time low, and if you look at multiple alarm fires … they’re down 20 percent in the last year, which means we’re getting to fires faster and we’re getting them out.”

The report, initially prepared by outside consultants hired by the city, found that call operators waste time on duplicative questions and employ inconsistent questioning procedures. The system, it found, sends some responders to the wrong address and slows fire and medical dispatchers’ efforts to give instructions to callers.

The report follows a yearslong overhaul of the system that included a new $680 million call center that combined the operations of police, fire and medical dispatchers. City officials have said the update improved response times, eliminated inefficiencies and reduced confusion for callers, but Friday’s report seemed to call some of that into question.

“Statistical information provided to City Hall management to demonstrate the success of the (Unified Call Taking) project contained errors and does not provide a clear picture of the effectiveness of UCT related business processes,” the report said. Holloway said that comment referred largely to the city’s practice of not tracking how long it takes from the moment an emergency call is placed until the moment responders are dispatched.

The report called on the city to instead calculate response times starting with the moment a person calls 911 and ending with the arrival of units on the scene. Holloway said the city was already looking into changing its emergency response time calculations and was moving in the direction suggested in the report.

The Uniformed Firefighters Association has been pressing in court for the release of earlier drafts of the report. The city has appealed a judge’s ruling that it must release those documents as part of a union arbitration.

On Friday, the union in a statement accused the city of releasing “a radically slimmed down and condensed version” of the consultant’s review and said it would pursue its case.

Holloway said that he had never seen a 216-page version of the report and said that it seemed clear the administration wasn’t trying to hide the consultants’ criticisms.

“If the city wanted to put out a sanitized report about the 911 system, this wouldn’t be it,” he said.

The consultants also found instances in which the city’s fire and police departments failed to work together. The agencies developed their plan to deal with a surge of calls in a crisis without collaborating, even though such an incident usually requires a multi-agency response, the report said. Additionally, the fire department’s emergency medical managers weren’t involved in developing procedures for police operators who now handle medical calls.

“NYPD call takers did not receive adequate training for (Unified Call Taking) responsibilities and are not proficient at handling FDNY related activity,” said the report, which also found that fire dispatch personnel were inadequately trained.

Read the story here.

ROCKFORD, IL — Fire Chief Derek Bergsten knew it was time to increase public awareness on proper 911 use when a video game and electronics store abruptly closed two weeks ago and a handful of customers called 911.

“We got three or four calls wanting to know how they’re going to get their iPad or their DS or game box or whatever back,” Bergsten said. “That is not an emergency.”

Some other recent 911 calls included reports of nearby home remodeling work that is too loud, barking dogs and, yes, kittens stuck in trees.

Inquiries are another popular category, Bergsten said.

“What is the nonemergency number? We get people who do that. What time is curfew? What’s the number for a cab company? That’s another one,” he said. “Like we’re the Yellow Pages.”

Stemming the flow of nonemergency phone calls to the city’s 911 center is a serious matter. Not only do the calls tie up 911 lines, but they tie up 911 operators who are trying to discern whether an actual emergency is taking place while emergency calls to 911 are waiting to get picked up.

Prosecution isn’t necessarily the answer. Abuse of 911 is a difficult charge to prove, Bergsten said. He’s tried it before, and it hasn’t worked. Proving that a caller had malicious intent or misused 911 on purpose, as the law requires, isn’t easy and doesn’t apply to most callers.

“To them, all they’re caring about in that moment is themselves,” Bergsten said. “What we want to try to do is help people understand that they can call the nonemergency line and still get the help they need.”

The city went through an extensive study of 911 calls in 2010 to identify what officials called “superusers,” people who called 911 dozens of times each year, often for nonemergency reasons. The Fire Department then worked with a hospital to get those residents the assistance they needed. Department officials are calling their efforts a success, but stress that it is a work in progress.

At the same time, the department addressed false alarms, particularly false medical alarms, by working with senior housing facilities to establish policies and practices that decreased 911 calls.

The last group of individuals the department is targeting is the typical resident who calls 911 because it’s convenient or because a person just doesn’t understand when to call 911 as opposed to 815-966-2900, the city’s nonemergency number.

Calls to 911 and 815-966-2900 go to the same place, explained Rockford fire 911 division head Sandy Stansell.

Operators place priority on 911 calls, Stansell said. If two calls come in at the same time — a 911 call and a 966-2900 call — the 911 is answered first.

“We want our emergencies to come through,” Stansell said. “If it’s a nonemergency call, we still answer it. But if an operator is on the line with a nonemergency call and an emergency comes in, we can put the nonemergency on hold and switch over.”

Stansell said the city did a lot of education back in 2006 when it launched the nonemergency phone number and saw good results.

“It may be that we’re just going to need to do it more for it to take hold,” she said.

Reach staff writer Corina Curry at ccurry@rrstar.com or 815-987-1371.

Emergency or not
Do you know when to call 911 as opposed to the nonemergency number, 815-966-2900? Test your knowledge with examples from Rockford’s 911 center:

1. You come home from vacation and you find that your garage has been broken into and items have been taken or are damaged.

2. Your neighbors are on vacation and people you don’t recognize are trying to force open windows or doors of their home.

3. Power lines are arcing or sparking.

4. Power lines have come down.

5. Chest pains or shortness of breath.

6. Kids won’t get dressed, do homework, go to school, etc.

7. You just witnessed someone stealing or damaging your property or committing a crime such as theft or robbery and is fleeing on foot or by car.

8. Car accident with no injuries.

9. Broken water pipe in basement.

10. House, car or other property is on fire.

11. Nonlife-threatening injury such as a sore foot or toothache.

12. You’ve fallen and you can’t get up.

Answers:
1. nonemergency 2. emergency 3. nonemergency 4. emergency 5. emergency 6. nonemergency 7. emergency 8. nonemergency 9. nonemergency 10. emergency 11. nonemergency 12. emergency

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The term refers to the ability of emergency personnel to communicate with each other and co-ordinate a response in case of a major fire, flood or other disaster.

Tuesday, firefighters, police and other government officials met at the Radisson Hotel in Sudbury to hear a presentation from the Canadian Interoperability Technology Interest Group (CITIG).

It’s an independent organization that advocates a joint response to emergencies on the local, provincial, national and international levels. Representatives are touring Canada to inform local emergency personnel about CITIG and to learn from them what their emergency co-ordination plans are and what they need.

Not surprisingly, communication is the biggest single factor on the minds of emergency crews.

“It’s absolutely vital that the folks on the ground are able to communicate with each other,” said Deputy Chief Al Lekun, of the Greater Sudbury Police Service. “That doesn’t just happen. It has to be co-ordinated.

“Today’s session is about assessing where we are today and making plans for the future.”

To that end, the federal government has designated the 700 MHZ band on the broadband spectrum for public safety use. Crews have traditionally operated on what’s known as the narrowband, which, as its name implies, has limitations in terms of capacity and speed.

Its use is generally limited to radio broadcasts and pagers. Broadband will allow communication across a much broader range of frequencies at the same time. So, for example, police could transmit information on a Blackberry or iPhone or upload information to the Internet. What’s more, expensive equipment could be replaced by much simpler tools.

“All the traditional communications equipment could be replaced with an iPad or a tablet,” said Lance Valcour, a retired Ottawa police officer who is now CITIG’s executive director.

By gaining access to broadband, emergency responders will have access to a much greater range of communication, he said. They can also monitor and post on social media, which can alert the world to emergencies even before emergency crews.

Michael Sullivan, division chief with the Ottawa Fire Service, said such technology has major implications.

“If someone sends us a cellphone pic of an accident, the technology exits to stamp that photo with location information,” Sullivan said. “It will allow mission-critical information to flow in real time.”

Tim Beadman, Greater Sudbury’s chief of emergency services, said he isn’t sure whether responders in Sudbury can locate an accident scene from a cellphone pic.

But he says Sudbury is ahead on many fronts, such as integrated communication. Police and fire emergency calls already go to the same 911 centre. The next goal is to integrate ambulance and paramedic crews, something that’s complicated because those are provincial agencies.

“City council has authorized us to look at an integrated dispatch service that combines all three services into one,” Beadman said. “We’re preparing a business plan for council and for the province.”

“It’s more than just a radio … It’s about developing policies together. It’s about training together.”

The focus has to be big picture, he said, rather than each agency developing a plan on its own.

“Say for example, if you had a flood. Who feels the aftereffects of the flood? The public. We had that horrible flood (in 2009). We were able to handle the emergency. But we need different agencies to take over at different times. It becomes a matter for public works, for the Red Cross … So that continuum has to be in place.”

Also working in Greater Sudbury’s favour is the training centre housed at the Lionel E. Lalonde Centre in Azlida, which offers training programs on how to respond to an emergency.

The city has specific plans on how to deal with a train or mining emergency, for example. Beadman says businesses have trained at the centre, something that will help in co-ordinating a response with city crews in the event of a disaster.

“Private industry is huge in this community,” he said. “And we have them training and doing (preparedness) exercises over the last couple of years. So that’s working well.”

The next step is signing mutual aid agreements with businesses who may have resources not available to local governments in the event of a crisis.

Valcour cited such recent events as the B.C. wildfires, the Vancouver Stanley Cup riots and the school shooting at Dawson College in Montreal as examples where better planning and tools could have made a difference.

“We need a national strategy,” Valcour said.

The goal of Tuesday’s forum, he said, was to move that process along, as well as raise awareness of what CITIG is and what it does.

Technology aside, CITIG has created a continuum to give towns and cities a way to judge exactly where their emergency plans rate on the interoperability scale, and where they need to improve. It includes five criteria: governance, standard operating procedures, technology, training and exercises and usage.

While all cities and towns must have an emergency plan in place, CITIG seeks to create a standard for all communities to reach when responding to a crisis, as well as planning a regional, provincial and national response to a crisis.

Read the story here.

Recently, Gov. Scott Walker signed into a law a bill sponsored by state Sen. Julie Lassa, D-Stevens Point. The new legislation doubles the fines for people convicted of knowingly making a fake emergency call to 911.

“Making a false emergency call is not a harmless prank,” Lassa said. “It endangers the safety of others and wastes public resources.”

State officials established the previous fines, $50 to $300, in 1978, Lassa said. While that might have been a deterrent back then, it isn’t sufficient now, she said.

“People pay a lot more than that for a pair of jeans today,” Lassa said.

As soon as people who work in dispatch centers heard about the proposed law a few months ago, they started contacting their legislators and endorsing the change, which increases fines to a range of $100 to $300, said Kelly Zenz, Wood County dispatch manager.

“We were really excited to see it pass through the committee and get signed in Eau Claire by the governor,” he said. “There are some people who just get a kick out of trying to prank us and making these nuisance calls.”

It is nice to see that the state, by increasing the fines, is sending a message to people that officials aren’t taking the fake emergency calls lightly, Zenz said.

There have been cases when dispatchers called back on a 911 call and were told nothing is wrong, only to have officers learn there really is a problem, Wood County Sheriff’s Department Lt. Shawn Becker said. Even though someone calling 911 says he or she doesn’t really need help, law enforcement officers have to check out the call to be sure, Becker said.

“It can get frustrating to deputies when they have to investigate a call that’s frivolous,” Becker said. “We have a lot of other things we could be doing.”

Wood County dispatchers haven’t dealt with a lot of prank 911 calls, but there have been some, Zenz said. With today’s technology, it is possible for people to use computers to send emergency calls that appear to dispatchers as if they’re from other locations.

During his conversations with legislators about the new law, Zenz promised to work on educating young people about the seriousness and possible repercussions of making phony emergency calls. He’s working on creating posters to place in Wood County schools warning about the penalties if someone gets caught.

Parents need to make sure children understand 911 calls are a tool, not a toy, Zenz said. It’s important for parents to teach children how to call 911 in an emergency but just as important for parents to make children understand what constitutes an emergency, he said.

Read the story here.

Problems about what could happen when someone calls 9-1-1 from a cell phone came to light when a woman driving on Pontiac Trail called 9-1-1 at 2:50 p.m., Friday, March 16 to report she and her two children were in a three-car accident while driving southbound on Lafayette Street in front of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church. It was a property damage report that didn’t involve a medical emergency.

The woman, who wrote a letter to the Herald, blamed South Lyon police with taking 45 minutes to respond. Police Chief Lloyd Collins said it actually took South Lyon police less than three minutes to respond — once they got the call.

Where the 9-1-1 cell calls are made in South Lyon as well as the service provided by various cell phone carriers will determine where the call is routed. In fact, in some cases Livingston County Sheriff’s dispatch picks up 9-1-1 calls on cell phones at various points in the city. It is unclear if that is what happened in this case, Collins said. However, he does know that Oakland County Sheriff’s Office from the Lyon Township Post were sent to the accident scene.

“Depending on who you get your cell service phone from it could go to any of a number of cell phone towers,” Collins said. “The programing of the cell phone towers tells the equipment which public safety answering point to route the 9-1-1 call to. In an ideal world, if you were calling from a cell phone you would have South Lyon towers and the call would go to the Novi Police Department, which is the public safety answering point for South Lyon.”

According to Collins, the Oakland County deputy who responded to the March 16 incident realized the accident was in the South Lyon police jurisdiction. After the call was received by South Lyon dispatch center, which is handled by Novi police, a South Lyon officer arrived less than three minutes later, according to Collins.

Part of the problem stems from South Lyon bordering multiple counties, as well as the fact that Lyon Township touches the city at multiple points.

“It’s a problem that people need to be educated about,” Collins said. “The issue is one of technology and it’s very difficult for any one entity to address it.”

South Lyon residents who make 9-1-1 calls from land lines in their homes likely won’t face a problem, because the dispatcher’s screen most often gives the exact location. Collins also emphasized that if the call involved an emergency, the first responder and other agencies would have addressed the needs without waiting for South Lyon to take the report.

In an effort to expedite 9-1-1 responses, cell phone users should make every effort to give their exact location to help the dispatcher contact the appropriate law enforcement agency. Collins recommends residents program the South Lyon police phone number into their cell phones.

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