Thursday, January 1, 2009

What is the address of your emergency?

I might have mentioned I finished my EMD course and I am now taking 911 calls in my dispatch center. It's really not a big deal, ninety-nine percent of the calls are pretty routine and easy to get through. But there's a one percent that just throw me off my game. The people who cannot tell me what the address is. And sadly enough, these are usually other public safety agencies that are unable to give me a location for the incident. We cover for our county 911 and so we very often get calls from the different cities whose call ends up being in the county. No big deal usually. Last night a local PD called and requested we send an ambulance to a country club. I did my normal thing, asked the address, and she had no answer for me. I asked for a map-grid. Nada. I asked if she could find out and I heard her radio one of her officers, who also could not give an address. Finally I brought up the internet and looked up the address myself. There are several things wrong with that. 1)I now cannot verify this is indeed the right address, its just a hope thing. 2)I only have about 30 seconds to get the call on our board, and we are now looking at close to two minutes that this call has been waiting. 3)All the lady can tell me is that its a nurologic problem. Well hell, a nurologic problem could be anything from "I wanna die", to "Oh look, I got shot in the head and there's brain matter all over the ground." It's a little frustrating.
Then as I was about to get off I recieved a call from another PD that serves out of our jurisdiction and they were begging for help. We had the truck available so we accepted the call and began getting ready to run it. The lady once again, could not give me a good address. This location is out of our jurisdiction so our crews don't know the area like they normall would. All she was able to give me was an abscure address that was neither in our map book or on google earth. It wasn't helping us at all. I tried to find it with no luck, had three different people working on it and none of us were having luck. Finally I called her back and got her to give me directions to the scene. By this time our call had been waiting at least five minutes to be dispatched and everyone was annoyed. My supervisor decided not to run the call afterwards due to not having a decent location address and the fact that this was further out of our jurisdiction than we realized, but as he called back to let them know it appears they were tired of waiting and cancelled us.
So..Basically if you're gonna call 911, please know your address. Or at the very least the closest cross streets. And if you call for mutual aid on new years eve, be helpful, don't be a bitch. OK? Thanks.

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