A freak accident that left a boy badly burned is not all that went wrong in a Fort Worth neighborhood last Friday. A neighbor also called 911 and no one answered.
“I called 911 and it rang for two full minutes,” Deborah Grindy recalled. “Nobody answered.”
Myles Roth, 7, suffered second-degree burns on his right leg when he stepped on what Oncor calls a “service enclosure” — a box built into the ground that should protect people from the buried electrical lines inside.
The pressure of Roth’s foot on the concrete lid was enough to spark an electrical explosion inside the enclosure, the cause of which Oncor is still investigating.
The accident happened shortly after 5 p.m. on the 14000 block of Dream River Trail in north Fort Worth.
As it turns out, the time and the location of the emergency are partly to blame for the problem when Deborah Grindy called 911.
“On the day this woman’s call was placed, an equipment failure was being experienced by the communications center,” said Sgt. Steve Enright, with the Fort Worth Police Department. “Evidently, the fiber optic cables that carry the calls to the center had deteriorated and, as such, only a limited number of calls could be received at any one time.”
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As personnel in the Fort Worth Police and Fire 911 Communications Center became aware of the technical issue with the cut lines, they decided to move call takers and dispatchers to a different building, according to Enright.
It was during this changeover when two 911 calls were “lost,” according to police, including Grindy’s first, unanswered call.
There was a second concern that arose when Grindy called 911 a second time.
According to police, Grindy reached a call taker who transferred her call three times, including once to an unmonitored, administrative phone line, before a dispatch supervisor for Fort Worth police answered the call.
That supervisor took Grindy’s information concerning Myles Roth’s accident and had to then hang up and personally call MedStar Mobile Healthcare to send an ambulance.
“This was a very unusual circumstance brought on by two issues," MedStar’s Director of Public Affairs Matt Zavadsky said. "A border community that would really border two different jurisdictions, coupled with essentially a catastrophic technology failure that was caused by the 911 lines being cut.”
The “catastrophic technology failure” Zavadsky mentioned is the issue with Fort Worth’s deteriorated fiber optic cables.
The “border community” is more of an ongoing, general concern that happens in cities like Haslet that border multiple emergency service jurisdictions, Zavadsky told NBCDFW. "Essentially the problem with overlapping, border communities can become 'Who answers that call for help?'”
Ideally, the initial call taker will put a priority on getting the caller the emergency help they need before worrying about exactly which jurisdiction is responsible, according to Zavadsky, but it can be a concern.
“911 cellular calls in areas of close or overlapping jurisdiction can direct a call to a communications center other than the one in whose jurisdiction the emergency exists,” explained Enright. “Personnel at these centers are trained to ascertain the location of the emergency and transfer the caller to the correct jurisdiction for response. It appears that is what happened here.”
From the time MedStar received the call for an ambulance, it took just over 12 minutes for the paramedics to arrive on the scene of Myles Roth’s accident, according to MedStar’s incident report.
Editor's Note: The original version of this story reported the incidents took place in Haslet -- that was an error. While the area's ZIP code is listed as being in Haslet, the subdivision is within the city limits of Fort Worth.
