AN ALLEGHENY COUNTY, PENNSYLVANIA, DISPATCHER was put on unpaid leave Monday following an incident where she mistakenly sent rescue crews to the wrong address. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:
The mistake resulted in an approximately seven-minute delay on Friday morning for emergency crews arriving at an apartment building on Crucible Street, where a mother had reported her baby had stopped breathing. The baby died later that morning at Children’s Hospital.
The unidentified woman had worked as a dispatcher, or telecommunications officer, for the city since 2001 and joined the county’s 911 staff in 2005.
The county uses a computer-aided dispatch system supplied by Tiburon Inc. The dispatcher had typed the correct street address for the call on Crucible Street, Chief Full said. When she went back to modify the address by including an apartment number, she mistakenly typed the “at” symbol rather than the adjacent number symbol, he said. That small error resulted changed the address in the system to “Crane Avenue.”
The 911 call center received the call at 6:12 a.m. Friday “from a frantic mother who said her baby was not breathing,” Chief Full said.
A full emergency crew was sent out at 6:15 a.m. When first responders arrived on Crane Avenue at 6:20, they discovered that the apartment number they had been given did not exist. They were redirected to Crucible Street, about a mile away, at 6:22 and arrived at 6:27.
“We are not standing here trying to blame a machine [for the error],” Chief Full said. “I believe [the dispatcher] had an opportunity to catch it one more time.”
The shop steward for the union local that represents the dispatch center employees called the suspension “premature and unwarranted,” while saying that the union will cooperate in an investigation into the incident.
Read the full story in the Post-Gazette HERE.
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