Problem with Emergency Communications System Affected 50 Calls a Day

PORTLAND, OR - An investigation into a deadly fire in Southeast Portland found nothing would have saved an elderly woman's life, but it did find another problem with the city's 9-1-1- system.

Around 50 emergency calls per day were affected by a glitch that prevented emergency operators from following up on cell phone callers that hung up or were disconnected.

A summary of the Ombudsman report concluded:

For more than a decade, the City’s emergency communications system has unintentionally lost important information about a subset of emergency calls, preventing operators from following City policy and causing underreporting of call hold times and abandoned call rates. In 2015 alone, the number of affected calls totaled 18,482.

Under city policy, if a cell phone caller hangs up or is disconnected while waiting to speak with a 9-1-1 operator, the calls are supposed to receive a return call to determine whether an emergency exists.

However, the emergency system does not retain the callers’ phone numbers and does not let operators know that the call occurred, according to the Ombudsman report.

The lost information is the result of a screening system, known as the Reno Solution, designed to reduce the volume of accidental cell phone calls to 9-1-1, according to the report.

The interaction between the communications systems created the unintended problem of the inability to call back tens of thousands of people who are presumed to have dialed 9-1-1 on purpose.

Bureau of Emergency Communications released a statement saying the Ombudsman report does not fully address the issue of nationwide issue of butt-dial overload.

"The purpose of the XMU - which was adopted in 2005- is to screen out "unintentional dials." If we did not have the screening system, BOEC would have to deal with all of the "unintentional 9-1-1 misdials," which would take time from dealing with real calls in an already overworked bureau," a statement from the Bureau of Emergency Communications said.

A state-funded phone system upgrade planned for Spring 2017 has the potential to resolve the problem.

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