Durham to investigate after all 911 calls routed to Raleigh on Saturday night

The city of Durham will investigate how its 911 center ended up with no one present to answer the phones Saturday night.

Calls to the Durham Emergency Communications Center were routed to Raleigh’s center instead, The News & Observer reported.

“It is not an approved practice of the city or the 911 leadership to route all incoming 911 calls to the Raleigh-Wake center, and we are working quickly to investigate and address the circumstances and decisions that led to this taking place,” Deputy City Manager Bo Ferguson said in a video message Monday.

The city is working with emergency response agencies to learn whether response times or services were affected that night, he said.

A ‘major risk,’ says firefighters group

The announcement comes after the Professional Fire Fighters of Durham Local 668 drew attention to the lack of staffing in a news release Saturday — an occurrence the group says is not unusual as the city struggles to fill vacant positions.

In an interview Sunday, Jimie Wright, the president of Local 668, called the staffing shortage a “major risk” with “a huge impact for the public.” He added that they’ve seen it take as long as 10 minutes for a call to reach them when routed through Raleigh.

“You can imagine calling 911, and our units aren’t even on the road for another 10 minutes,” he said. “There simply is no excuse for it, and we’ve got to be better.”

In a statement issued Sunday, Randy Beeman, the director of Durham’s center, said it was “staffed with dispatchers throughout the evening on Saturday,” but that “calls were initially answered by call-takers in the Raleigh-Wake Emergency Communications Center for seven hours due to unplanned absences.”

Beeman said the center used “alternate call-routing” to Raleigh between the hours of 8 p.m. and 3 a.m. Saturday. “[T]his method of handling surge calls has been in place since December,” when the center faced staffing shortages caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, he added.

But Wright said this method is meant for emergency situations that overwhelm the system with thousands of 911 calls — like the 2019 explosion caused by a gas leak in Durham.

“That doesn’t mean they’re overwhelmed because we don’t have the staffing,” he said.

As of April 30, Beeman said in the statement that 9% of Durham’s 911 calls were being answered by Raleigh’s center. He added that the communications center expected to stop routing calls through Raleigh within two months.

Beverly Thompson, a spokeswoman for the city of Durham, said there are currently 26 vacant positions out of a total of 60 at the DECC. Three out of 18 call-taking positions are vacant, she said.

Recruiting and training a call-taker for the center can take 12 to 16 weeks, according to Beeman.

Typically, Thompson said two to four call-takers are present during shifts.

When 30 seconds can be ‘critical’

Wright said when Raleigh handles 911 calls for Durham, crucial information can be lost in transition. Raleigh call-takers may take down the wrong address without realizing it, or fail to recognize immediately when calls are placed from apartment buildings, Wright said.

When responders arrive on scene, they could lack the apartment number needed to locate someone in need of medical attention, or could be in the wrong location altogether, he said.

“A delay of 30 seconds can be extremely critical,” Wright said.

Durham City Council member Mark-Anthony Middleton said he felt “deeply, deeply concerned” after hearing about the centers staffing shortage.

“This, of course, is the first line of defense for us as a city for any type of emergency. These are truly our first, first responders,” he said. “And the notion that we would not be acting not only optimally, but totally outsourcing the function, of course is an unacceptable state of affairs.”

He added that he’d previously been aware of the shortages, but had never heard of a 100% routing of calls to Raleigh.

Wright said it’s “unacceptable” to see the problem persist for so long, despite awareness from leadership.

“We’ve been working since December with our city leadership, our council members, our mayor, our department directors — both fire and the dispatch director — on trying to find a way to alleviate this problem, improve it, and make the correction,” he said. “Unfortunately, in the business that we’re in, time is of the essence. For us not to have this fix now, in May, there’s just no excuse for it.”

This story was originally published May 9, 2021 at 3:16 PM.