If you called 911 from an unincorporated spot in Santa Barbara County after dark on Aug. 19, you most likely spoke with one of eight people.
Sitting in semi-darkness, responding to crackling voices coming over their radios and basking in the glow of at least four computer monitors, their fingers clickity-clacked away on keyboards while they answered your emergency calls.
Maybe you’re the woman who dialed 911 because your son was having trouble breathing from his car seat. He was coughing in fits, turning red, and either falling back asleep or passing out—you weren’t sure which. You were pulled over on the side of Highway 101 on the Clark Avenue overpass as you spoke with dispatcher Lauren Edie.
Edie had dispatched emergency services almost as soon as you breathed your first flurry of words into the phone line. She spoke gently to you as she let you know that first responders were already on their way, but she continued to press you for more.
“How old is he? … OK, he’s 3 years old?”
“OK, is he responding to you normally?”
“Is he asleep?”
“Is he changing color?”
“Help is already on its way. … Can you put your hazards on?”
She was trying to build a more complete picture of your situation as she typed information into the computer-aided dispatch (CAD) system, in order to give responders a better idea of how to aid your son when they arrived on scene.
Edie and her colleagues—dispatchers Julia Cardenas, Kari Slone, Madeline Hain, and Kris Hargreaves; dispatch trainees Celeste Johnson and Georgie Grippa, and dispatch shift supervisor Rachel Chester—fielded dozens of calls between 7 and 9:30 p.m. that Saturday night at the Regional Emergency Communications Center on County Road in Goleta. Thirty-one dispatchers work for the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office and answer roughly 800 calls a day (an estimated 160 of which are 911 emergency calls) made from the unincorporated areas of the county; the contract cities of Goleta, Buellton, Carpinteria, and Solvang; and the city of Guadalupe.
Roughly 22 percent of those calls are for emergency medical services (EMS), 8 percent are for fire, and 70 percent are for law enforcement, according to a study presented to the Santa Barbara County Board of Supervisors during a July 25 hearing. At that hearing, the supervisors voted unanimously to direct county staff to look at what it would take to separate the dispatch functions for fire and EMS from those of law enforcement due to long-standing issues with the way the Sheriff’s Office runs the dispatch center.
Over the past several years, the county’s Fire Department and EMS Agency have voiced concerns over the level of service they receive from the Sheriff’s Office, the cost of those services, and the lack of oversight they have over the way the center is run. Issues include a staff that’s too lean, technology in need of upgrades, the inability to dispatch the closest first responders to an emergency (because county dispatch can’t see every city’s fire engines), and the interruption of emergency medical calls where a dispatcher is giving a caller potentially life-saving instructions.
Undersheriff Bernard Melekian told the Sun that he and Sheriff Bill Brown both agree with the Fire Department, EMS Agency, and Board of Supervisors: There are problems that need to be addressed. What they don’t agree with is how to make that happen. Because the bulk emergency calls are for law enforcement, the Sheriff’s Office believes it should take the lead in making changes.
“Can improvements be made? Absolutely,” Melekian said. “We just believe we can do it with the existing facility.”
High demand
With six dispatchers on duty the night of Aug. 19, shift supervisor Chester said the center was “upstaffed” due to UC Santa Barbara students’ move-in to Isla Vista three days prior. It had been a “low activity” kind of night, but that could change quickly, she said, referring to the killing rampage that shook Isla Vista on May 23, 2014, resulting in seven deaths and 14 injuries. The shift that day had started with “low activity” as well.
The job is unpredictable, and Chester said that while there are procedures to follow, there is rarely an “if A, then B” type of scenario. It’s all about zeroing in on what somebody is going through and deciding what is needed. For most of the people who call in, it’s the first and only time they’ve called 911 and it’s most likely one of the worst days of their lives.
“A lot of times we’re flying by the seat of our pants, and just figure out how to handle a situation,” she said. “Everything from law to fire … oceans to the rivers to the beaches to the mountains … a kayaker in distress 1 mile out, a broken ankle on an island, a guy stuck up one of the radio towers [that happened on Aug. 16 in Orcutt].”
In July, the dispatch center answered more than 5,000 emergency phone calls made to 911. That doesn’t include calls made to the non-emergency public safety phone numbers that get routed to dispatchers, Chester said. And some of those shifts, during the Alamo and Whittier fires, had only three dispatchers on duty because of how short-staffed the center was. At one point during the fires, county dispatch also had to pick up calls for Santa Maria and Lompoc over a five-day period. The Alamo Fire had burned up the fiber-optic cables that ran to both cities’ dispatch centers, the Sheriff’s Office said.
Usually there’s a minimum of four dispatchers (including the supervisor) per shift: one each to dispatch EMS, fire, and law enforcement, and one to look up license plate numbers, warrants, etc., for sheriff’s deputies. Dispatchers have been on mandatory overtime (48 hours a week) for about a year now with no signs of relief due to budget constraints and difficulty recruiting and maintaining staff.
But staffing dispatch centers is notoriously difficult, said Undersheriff Melekian, who manages operations for the Sheriff’s Office and started his more than 40-year career in law enforcement as a dispatcher. It’s a nationwide problem that’s not unique to Santa Barbara County.
“It is one of the most difficult and underappreciated jobs in this profession,” Melekian said. “It’s difficult to hire people.”
For one, you have to be the right fit for the job: The kind of person who is usually “watching TV, talking on their cell phone, and surfing the internet” all at the same time, Chester said. A mere five minutes inside the dispatch center is dizzying. Dispatchers are talking to people going through their own personal emergencies, making split-second decisions, updating the CAD system, locating units, dispatching the right ones, processing warrants, and listening to other one-sided conversations happening in the same room.
“During a busy period in a dispatcher’s day, they may acknowledge literally hundreds of routine transmissions and then out of the clear blue sky, they will have to deal with a significant emergency like the Isla Vista shootings in 2014,” Melekian said. “And do so while maintaining an air of calm and professionalism so that the units in the field receive the information in an understandable and immediate way.”
For two, it takes at least a year to train the right person. Those two trainees on shift Aug. 19 only have a month or so left before they are “signed off,” and ready to field calls on their own. That’s only to be cleared at the Dispatch 1 position, which can handle law enforcement calls. They then need to start training to become a Dispatch 2 for fire and EMS, which can take another eight months.
Prioritizing needs
Dispatchers are also trained to do what’s called emergency medical dispatch (EMD), which means they can give out potentially life-saving instructions to people who are waiting for help to arrive, Chester explained. The dispatch center in Goleta is the only public safety answering point in the county that can handle EMD calls, so if the dispatch center in Santa Maria, Lompoc, or Carpinteria/Montecito gets a call for one of the “three Cs”—choking, cardiac arrest, or childbirth—it gets routed to county dispatch.
In January 2015, the interruption rate for those calls was at 55 percent, Melekian said. Meaning, in the middle of giving life-saving instructions on more than half of EMD calls, dispatchers had to momentarily interrupt their flow of words to handle something else, however brief it was. Melekian started working for the sheriff around that time and said it was one of the first projects he was handed.
In 2016, the interruption rate decreased to 10 percent. So far this year, Melekian said the rate was at 6 percent, a huge improvement over 2015.
The county’s Emergency Medical Services Agency director, Nicholas Clay, said his department’s main priority is making sure that dispatch has a “high quality of EMD done to 100 percent of the medical calls.”
“Given the current setup and program, we just don’t have the ability to do that,” Clay said. “The system really isn’t designed for optimal output. Certainly a lot of improvements have been made over the last several years, I definitely don’t want to say the sheriff hasn’t listen to our concerns.”
County Fire Chief Eric Peterson spoke to the county Board of Supervisors during the July 25 hearing and said that separating law enforcement dispatch from fire/EMS would give dispatchers a little more breathing room. It would also give fire/EMS the ability to do their own hiring and training, starting immediately on fire/EMS dispatch training rather than having to wait a year for law enforcement training to be completed.
“It is my opinion that they are chronically understaffed and chronically asked to do too much,” Peterson said, adding that his comments shouldn’t be taken as criticism of the work that dispatchers do—he believes the county’s dispatchers are doing great work.
He said that separating the two sides would broaden the recruitment pool—because law enforcement needs are more specialized, requiring background checks and assessments—and simplify the body of knowledge that each dispatcher would need to know.
Melekian countered at the July 25 meeting by saying that the two-center solution was merely “bifurcating the problem,” rather than fixing it.
“It doesn’t magically solve the problem for both departments,” he told county supervisors.
Fire Division Chief Martin Johnson told the Sun that having a separate and stand-alone fire/EMS dispatch center means it could better and more diligently focus on responding to emergencies specific to fire/EMS. He said the same could be said of the Sheriff’s Office.
Although there are certain incidents that all the agencies respond to—say a stabbing or a vehicle accident—most of the time the incidents are unique to one side or the other, Johnson said. Fire wouldn’t be dispatched to respond to a burglary, for instance. And sheriff’s deputies wouldn’t be dispatched to respond to help a 90-year-old woman whose hip popped out.
“Right now you have everybody in the same pond, and sometimes you have competing interests,” Johnson said. “These dispatchers are in a very, very tough job, where they have to balance a lot of plates.”
But the Fire Department believes a separation could solve more than the staffing issue. At the moment, there is a “governance group” made up of stakeholders that include fire and EMS. But, according to county Fire Division Chief Marin Johnson, serving on that board doesn’t necessarily equate to having influence over how things are run.
“The sheriff runs the dispatch center, and the sheriff alone makes decisions on things like improvements, enhancements … all of that kind of stuff, hiring, firing, it’s all handled under the auspices of the sheriff’s department,” Johnson told the Sun. “So this governance group doesn’t really govern anything.”
Slice of services
One enhancement that the Fire Department has been waiting for is an upgrade to the dispatch center’s CAD system. Johnson said the fire engines have computers in them that have reached the end of their lifespan and need to be replaced. However, the next generation of mobile computers is more advanced than the county’s current CAD system, so if the engines’ computers get replaced, they won’t be able to communicate with the dispatch center.
“We had to try to keep them going because we didn’t have any other option, but now we have no other choice,” Johnson said. “The Fire Department recently had to come up with the funds to come up with a more recent version of CAD that would enable the system and our engines to be able to function.”
The upgrade cost an estimated $40,000, he said. But the dispatch center is still waiting for it to actually be installed.
Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Kelly Hoover said the delay is due to the work being done on the back end to prepare the upgrade, including mapping and software updates as well as building new servers.
“We are unwilling to move ahead with an update until everything is prepared correctly,” she told the Sun via email.
County fire already pays for about a third of the dispatch center’s cost: about $1.46 million for fiscal year 2017-18, according to a report presented to supervisors on July 25. EMS is funding $1.47 million for fiscal year 2017-18 and the Sheriff’s Office (including a $55,000 contribution from the Guadalupe Police Department) is paying $2.19 million.
Another technology that both fire and EMS are hoping to utilize is something called “borderless dispatch,” also know as a regional integrated emergency management system. Basically, bringing all of the agencies in the county together under one roof—either physically or metaphorically—so dispatchers can see where the closest resource is, whether it’s a Santa Barbara County fire engine or one from Santa Maria.
Currently, the dispatch centers for Lompoc, Santa Maria, Carpinteria/Summerland, Santa Barbara city, Vandenberg Air Force Base, UC Santa Barbara, and the Los Padres National Forest don’t “talk” to each other. Their separate CAD systems stay separated, thus they can’t see each other’s resources.
Undersheriff Melekian said he and Sheriff Brown believe the county should definitely pursue collaboration between all of the area’s dispatch centers. He also said it’s something the Sheriff’s Office has the ability to do in its current dispatch center. But the Fire Department doesn’t really want to wait.
“What we’re talking about is an opportunity to bring all of those entities together into one dispatch center, where it doesn’t matter what color a fire engine is or whether you’re in the city boundary or the county boundary, we just want to get the closest resource to the incident as quickly as possibly,” fire Division Chief Johnson said. “That’s a massive benefit to the citizenry of this county. I don’t see how that is possible under the current—just the physical structure at the existing dispatch center—and without true governance, those other agencies would be hard-pressed to consolidate under that model.”
County fire is pushing to move fire/EMS dispatch services to a currently unoccupied fire station, where it can get moving to stitch all of those resources together. In total, the change could cost approximately $8 million, a sum that Johnson said is already in the bank.
“We postponed a couple of major capital projects and took that money and set it aside,” Johnson said. “We have the funding in place to build a dispatch center.”
According to the report presented to county supervisors on July 25, Ventura County separated dispatch centers and moved to create a borderless system about 20 years ago. In 2016, the last pieces finally came together. Santa Barbara County staff is slated to bring research and recommendations to the Board of Supervisors sometime in the fall, but no date has been set yet.
The county’s dispatch center will operate in its “upstaffed” capacity through Halloween due to Isla Vista and the recent influx of students, dispatch shift supervisor Chester said. She recently switched from the day to night shifts (each of which is 12 hours), a transition she said is tough. She’s been working as a dispatcher for 10 years now and said she does it because she wants to make sure everyone—both the public and first responders—gets home safe at the end of the night. It’s cliché, she said, but there’s no other way to describe it.
“They are our guys out there, and if something were to go wrong, we would take it really, really personally,” Chester said. “So much of what we do hinges on making sure we get that outcome.”
Contact Executive Editor Camillia Lanham at clanham@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Aug 24-31, 2017.