Ailing 911 network might need major surgery

Area director says much of Flathead County's emergency equipment needs to be upgraded

The Flathead County emergency dispatch network has some holes in it.

And the area's 911 director is trying to figure out how to patch them.

New director Lisa Durand recently discussed some of those holes with the Flathead City-County 911 Administrative Board. These holes included:

. Fuzzy information on boundaries between fire districts occasionally led to the dispatch of the wrong department in some emergencies.

. Some radio and pager signals did not reach some rural fire districts.

. Twenty-four hours of dispatch recordings are gone. An equipment glitch turned off the recording equipment for roughly 24 hours without alerting workers that it had stopped.

Flathead County's widespread 911 system might begin to go through a major transformation.

That is, if enough money and a location for a consolidated 911 center can be found.

Local officials also will have to plan how to upgrade and consolidate the county's four 911 systems.

Kalispell, Whitefish and Columbia Falls each has a 911 center to handle only police calls within their city limits.

The Flathead County Sheriff's Office supervises the fourth 911 center, which handles all city and rural fire and emergency calls in the county, and all law-enforcement calls outside of the three cities. Flathead County has 19 rural fire departments.

Problems exist with the main 911 center - which may have four people on a shift - handling fire, ambulance and administrative duties while also dispatching sheriff's deputies. Another problem is that police calls have to be routed to the correct 911 center.

The 911 board hired Durand, of rural Whitefish and a former longtime emergency dispatch manager, to study how to fix the far-flung network. She recommended consolidating 911 functions at a new site under an independent agency. The 911 board agreed.

Then in mid-May, the board hired Durand to be its 911 director - giving her the twin tasks of setting up a consolidated center and overhauling the current system.

Many problems are due to the 911 network being a hodgepodge of equipment, with much of the machinery needing upgrades.

One problem is that the 911 system should have computerized tracking equipment that takes a caller's location and instantly identifies which ambulance or fire department should respond.

Under the current system, dispatchers can get an idea of a caller's location. But then they have to figure out which fire department to alert.

Sometimes, information is unclear about where the boundaries are.

A dispatcher also might handle an emergency at a location such as West Reserve Drive along Kalispell's north border. In some places, Kalispell is north of West Reserve, and in other places the incorporated area is south. Or a dispatch might receive a call from a West Reserve address and must guess whether it is on the north or south side of the street - which determines which emergency and law agencies to call.

"They don't always guess right," Durand said.

Durand started tracking when a dispatcher, because of fuzzy information, contacted the wrong responder. One such call occurred in May, and six occurred in June. It is too early to intelligently interpret what these figures mean out of hundreds of calls, she said.

"We have some hard-working, compassionate people [as dispatchers] who want to do a good job," Durand said.