Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 3, 1993 TAG: 9303030389
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FIRE! FIRE! AND 33 MINUTES LATER . . .
AT 2:47 A.M. Sunday, the manager of the Holiday Inn-Salem dialed 911 to report a fire. Not until 33 minutes later did the first pumper arrive. By then, the blaze had burned out of control, causing at least $1 million in damage to the lobby, restaurant and conference rooms of the motel.Fortunately, the Holiday Inn fire took no lives. It's no tragedy compared with the 1989 fire at Shenandoah Homes retirement center, which cost four lives. In that fire, the call was routed to a county station because the retirement center is in the county, even though a city station was closer.
Computer error and human oversight are cited as the cause of the Holiday Inn delay. But let's not miss the forest fire for the trees. Let's not overlook systemic error.
Let's not ignore the crazy multiplicity of governments in the Roanoke Valley, each insisting on having its own emergency-response department, methods and communication systems - a convoluted mess that invites error and magnifies the consequences.
You might expect, for example, the Holiday Inn-Salem to be in Salem. In fact, it is in Roanoke County.
Any emergency call within the geographically compact Roanoke Valley, you might assume, would go through a central dispatcher. In fact, there are four dispatch centers, reflecting the divisions of local government; the valley's complicated 911 system had to be designed so calls would automatically be routed to the correct dispatcher.
The city dispatcher, you might suppose, should be able to dispatch county firetrucks if the need arises. In fact, even after computer error was suspected Sunday morning, the call had to work its way through the county's separate emergency-response system.
And you might think the valley, or at least its urbanized areas, would get about the same level of fire protection. In fact, the level varies widely.
For almost every call - thousands of them - 911 works properly. It should: Valley residents have had to pay extra, and had to wait until 1987 for any 911 system to be installed, because balkanized local government made it necessary to acquire an enhanced version.
But in this instance, the E-911 mainframe in Washington, D.C., held erroneous data. The pay phone from which the Holiday Inn-Salem's manager called was mistakenly keyed to a city Holiday Inn's address. Perhaps the dispatcher should have noticed that the first three phone numbers were "387," a Salem and west county code. On the other hand, it isn't a valleywide dispatch center; the city dispatcher should be getting only city calls anyway.
Within five minutes, city firefighters were at the computer-reported but wrong address. They reported a false alarm. The dispatcher replayed the tape, decided the accented voice had said "Holiday Inn-Salem," and called Salem's dispatcher. This took another two minutes, for a total of seven.
That's seven too many minutes wasted on a mistaken address when a real fire is somewhere else. But why on Earth should it take another 26 minutes to get a pumper to the right location?
Chalk up nearly three minutes - including 20 seconds or so on the initial call to Salem, only to learn that the Holiday Inn-Salem is in the county's bailiwick - just to get the whole deal explained and transferred from the Roanoke city emergency-services system to the Roanoke County emergency-services system.
Another eight minutes were lost when police, rather than firefighters, were sent to check out the three Holiday Inns in the county. All three were adjacent to city-county borders; it seems likely that a valleywide police force, its units deployed without regard to jurisdictional lines, could have shaved the time.
Finally, it took 15 minutes, from the time a county patrolman reported the fire, for the first pumper truck to arrive. Bluntly put, the difference between five minutes and 15 minutes is the difference between a professional force and a volunteer force. City residents choose to pay more in taxes for a professional Fire Department; county residents choose to pay more in premiums for fire insurance.
Unfortunately, the Roanoke Valley lacks a single, unified government. Absent that, the valley should have a single, unified emergency-services system. Failing that, can't we at least get a single, unified dispatching center?