New Fire Dispatch System Sends Mixed Signals

Marina del Rey Fire Capt. Bruce Collings remembers the time when the county’s new computer dispatch system ordered his seagoing fireboat to Westlake Village to put out an on-board blaze.

“We said, ‘OK, we’ll put it on the trailer and be right over,’ ” he said with a laugh.

The computer didn’t know that Westlake Village is landlocked.

Critics of the sophisticated $27-million system say there is a lot more that the computer and the people who operate it don’t know about putting out fires and rescuing accident victims in the 50 communities served by Los Angeles County firefighters.

They point to incidents in which rescuers have been sent to the wrong addresses, to the wrong streets, even to the wrong cities.

Two weeks ago, for example, rescue units were sent to the small Antelope Valley community of Valyermo instead of a doctor’s office in Lancaster, where a woman was suffering seizures. It turned out that the street on which the doctor’s office was located had been misspelled in the computer’s database, a problem since corrected.

The percentage of incorrect dispatches is small. The county sends crews on 600 calls every day and the vast majority are handled properly, the department says. But even one error can be life-threatening or, at the least, result in prolonged pain.

“I live in this area,” said a firefighter in the Antelope Valley who asked not to be identified. “I think, ‘If my family calls for an emergency, are we going to be able to respond to it?’ ”

Officials in the Los Angeles County Fire Department admit that there were bugs in the system that went on-line in February and completely revamped the way calls for help are handled. In particular, there have been difficulties in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, where population growth and local anomalies present unusual challenges to the new computer and to the people manning it.

But fire officials say that the system is getting better and that once it is running smoothly, it will be a vast improvement over the one it replaced.

“We believe that yes, there are problems, but I think we’re getting a lot better,” said John M. Cummings, assistant fire chief for the Command and Control Division of the Services Bureau.

Already, the new system has cut the average emergency response time. “Every call is two minutes faster than under the old system. That can mean the difference between life and death,” Cummings said.

Yet mistakes and complaints from firefighters in the field are still occurring eight months after the system went on-line.

The county’s Fire Department is the nation’s third largest, behind those of the cities of Chicago and New York. Until this year, it relied upon a 1975-era computer system designed to handle 35,000 calls a year.

In recent years, the number of calls has risen to 180,000 annually. The department aims to get calls out in 85 seconds, but the average under the old system had grown to three minutes.

“The old system was failing,” Cummings said.

In 1987, a contract for a new system was awarded to PRC Public Management Services, based in McLean, Va. PRC, which has offices in Orange County, has designed 150 dispatch systems for police and fire departments in Canada, Ireland and across the United States.

The new system, called Computer Aided Dispatch, or CAD for short, is vastly different from the one it replaced. The old system relied upon voice communication, while the new one can perform all functions through electronic commands, speeding up call-handling in a major emergency.

In a typical call, the 911 operator transfers the request for help to a county fire call-taker, who records the information and then pushes a button to send it to the dispatcher. The dispatcher pushes a button that alerts the appropriate units in the field to respond.

Firefighters receive the information on terminals and communicate directly with the computer by pushing buttons on their own mobile terminals to signal when they have arrived at the scene of a fire and when they have returned to the station.

Besides buying a brand-new computer system, the department decided to consolidate its three dispatch centers in downtown Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley and the Antelope Valley for efficiency’s sake. Calls for help from all over the county are now answered from a second-floor room in the new East Los Angeles building, where dispatchers sit in front of banks of new computer terminals.

Finally, civilian dispatchers were hired to replace the firefighters who had been doing the work under the old system.

With all these changes occurring at about the same time, there were bound to be problems, according to Tom Clark, a battalion chief in San Diego, which also has a new PRC-designed dispatch system.

“We did not move to a brand-new computer system and change to civilian dispatchers, and also consolidate from three regional dispatch centers to one,” he said. “When you do that, you’re going to experience some growth and implementation problems.”

Shortly after the Los Angeles County system went on-line in February--the San Gabriel Valley was brought in in March and the Antelope Valley in May--problems began surfacing.

On March 29, Cummings sent a blistering memo to dispatchers and battalion chiefs stating that four incidents were either not dispatched or had considerable delay. “The Department cannot tolerate this level of performance,” the memo said.

None of the four incidents resulted in death, said Cummings, who admits that “I was upset at that point.” Some dispatchers “weren’t quite as conscientious as they should have been,” he said.

While complaints involving incorrect dispatches and delays have died down in the Los Angeles Basin, said Cummings, they are still being heard in the Antelope Valley.

“Every time we have a problem, they say it won’t happen again,” one Antelope Valley firefighter said about the dispatch center. “Then it does. It’s frustrating.”

The complaints are even echoing outside the firefighting community.

“We hear the frustration being vented by the paramedics,” said Victoria Helmandollar, director of the emergency room at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster.

The hospital staff met with paramedics recently to review emergency procedures, and some of them complained about the dispatch problems.

As the meeting ended, an emergency call came in. “Right out of the meeting they were dispatched to the wrong address,” Helmandollar said. “I would have thought it would be better now.”

“Is there a problem still going on? Yes, there is,” Cummings said. But he insists that things are improving even in the high desert.

Some of the problems can be traced to the nature of the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys. Unlike the Los Angeles Basin, those valleys’ populations are growing rapidly.

“When we went live on May 15, that first 30 days there were some eye-openers for us,” Cummings said. He found that numerous new streets were not in the new database, meaning that, as far as the computer was concerned, they did not exist. County employees worked 20 hours a day and eventually made 3,000 additions to the database, called the “geofile.”

If things were hectic downtown, they were just as hectic out in the field. “It started off what we consider bad,” said Battalion Chief Robert Mazzocco of Station 33 in Lancaster. Mistakes in dispatch had his firefighters “really jumping through the hoop for a while.”

Those complaining about the geofile frequently ask why the county got rid of its old database, which many firefighters said was reliable.

Dick O’Connor, vice president of the southwest region of Public Management Services, said the new database can plot fires by latitude and longitude. That is important when you have a fire in a remote area with no convenient landmarks.

He also maintains that even before the computer was turned on, all the information in the old database was put into the new geofile.

Critics persist in their belief that the new database was not as reliable as the old one when the system started operation. And county officials admit that some information was put into the database incorrectly.

On Oct. 23, for instance, a diabetic in the office of Dr. Clayton Reynolds on North Lowtree Avenue in Lancaster began having seizures. Lucy Chacon, a receptionist in the office, said she called and gave the address to the county fire dispatcher.

“It took 30 minutes before the Fire Department got there,” Chacon said. The woman survived, but Chacon was upset by the experience.

“I pray I never have a heart attack or my house is burning.”

County Fire Capt. William Blackburn, a supervisor in the dispatch center, said the name of the street was misspelled in the geofile. That caused the dispatcher to send emergency personnel to an address on Longview in the community of Valyermo. The spelling has been corrected, he said.

Another frequent complaint is that the dispatchers based far away in East Los Angeles don’t understand the high desert, with its wide open spaces and strangely named streets.

In the old days, the dispatch center in the Antelope Valley was manned by firefighters who lived in the area and knew all of its anomalies.

Much of the valley is divided into east and west branches of the same streets. Because the valley is so vast, an address far out on 20th Street West might be many miles from the same address on 20th Street East, causing major delays in response times if the dispatcher mistakes west for east.

On the night of Oct. 26, fire equipment was sent to put out a structure fire in the 47000 block of 30th Street West. The real address was on 30th Street East, and the mix-up meant that firefighters did not arrive until 24 minutes after the call went out.

Luckily, the structure turned out to be a shed, not a house. Battalion Chief Michael Balzano said a “brand-new dispatcher” simply made an error.

There has also been some confusion over which units are needed to handle a particular emergency, according to critics.

The fireboat incident in Marina del Rey, for instance, happened because whoever took the call listed it as a boat fire, even though the boat was on dry land. The computer automatically dispatched Collings’ fireboat, unaware that there was a big chunk of land between Westlake Village and the ocean.

These problems lead the critics to ask why the county switched to civilian dispatchers when firefighters used to do the job so well.

Cummings said this is a misconception. He said errors were not uncommon under the old system, but they weren’t as obvious.

Secondly, he said civilian turnover is only 10%, compared with 40% for firefighters, who regarded dispatch work as a temporary assignment until they could get out in the field.

“I will take the blame for one point,” Cummings said. “I should have hired 10 more” dispatchers in the beginning.

A shortage of dispatchers has forced the department to require employees to work overtime shifts. “A lot of folks are working 60 hours a week,” Cummings said, and one dispatcher said she put in 90 hours of overtime last month.

“That is not good in this environment,” Cummings said. New dispatchers are being trained and Cummings said the problems are being alleviated.

Defenders of the new system say some of the complaining may be attributable to a yearning for the good old days, whether or not those days were all that good.

The new system puts a greater burden on the firefighters, who are supposed to keep the dispatch center up to date on their activities via the computer. If they forget, and some do, the computer loses track of them. “The onus is on them and some of them don’t like it,” one ranking Fire Department official said.

Some firefighters, confronted with all the new technology--along with non-uniform dispatchers who are learning their jobs--may not have much patience.

Outsiders who listen to police radio scanners say they have heard arguments over the air between dispatch and field units, something that used to be rare.

“A lot of people are sharpshooting or headhunting,” San Diego Battalion Chief Clark said.

Even many critics believe that the bugs will eventually be worked out of the system and that it will be everything that was promised.

“I think it’s working better each day, week and month,” Cummings said. Asked whether he is happy with the performance so far, he replied: “I’m happy with its performance, but I’m never satisfied.”

Computer Glitches

* Wrong equipment: The county’s new computer dispatch system orders a fireboat to Westlake Village to put out a boat fire. “We said, ‘OK, we’ll put it on the trailer and be right over,’ ” Marina del Rey Fire Capt. Bruce Collings laughed. The computer didn’t know that Westlake Village is landlocked.

* Wrong town: Rescue units are sent to the small Antelope Valley community of Valyermo instead of a doctor’s office in Lancaster, where a woman was suffering seizures. It turned out that the street on which the doctor’s office was located had been misspelled in the computer’s database.

* Wrong direction: Fire equipment is sent to a structure fire in the 47000 block of 30th Street West. The real address was on 30th Street East, and the mix-up meant that firefighters did not arrive until 24 minutes after the call went out.