The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.
Jonathon Naylor Editor Fire! Fire! We gotta get out!'' Judy Eagle yelled as flames almost twice her height consumed her home. The crackling of the inferno had stirred her awake moments earlier. Now she and her husband were rushing outside in their pajamas. 'I had nightmares for a month about fire (afterwards),' Eagle recalls of the blaze that struck her Boam Street home last summer. She's over the bad dreams but not the frustration over her dealings with 911. When Eagle used her cellphone to call the three-digit emergency number after fleeing the blaze, she received not a live operator, but a recording. 'I couldn't believe my ears,' she says. 'People need a voice. They need a real human voice to respond to times of emergency like that.' But that's not always the case. All 911 calls placed in Manitoba, with the exception of those in Winnipeg, are answered by a call centre operated by the City of Brandon. Working as a team, two operators answer incoming calls. If both operators happen to be busy, callers hear a recording. Eagle, a lawyer, interpreted the recording as telling her to leave a message explaining her emergency. So she did, in great detail. She would call back twice more, again hearing the recording. As she watched fire destroy her home, she had no idea whether help was coming. Throughout the minutes-long ordeal, Eagle even phoned the old seven-digit number to the Flin Flon Fire Dept., and two-seven digit numbers for the RCMP. But each time, she says, she was reverted back to 911. And there was still no live voice. Eagle didn't know it at the time, but firefighters were indeed on the way. Ross Robinson, director of emergency communications for the City of Brandon, says that when Eagle called 911 the first time, operators already had a caller on the line reporting the same fire. He says the recording Eagle heard would have told her to stay on the line, not leave a message. See 'No...' on pg. 12 Continued from pg. 12 'There's no opportunity for (callers) to leave a message,' Robinson says, adding that this is the first time he has heard of a caller being under the impression they were to leave a message. Robinson says call centre records show Eagle hung up 44 seconds into her first call, placed at 11:40 p.m. on Aug. 4. Right after that, he says, an operator tried calling her back 'several times' but could not get a hold of her until a little over three minutes later. Eagle remembers it taking longer than that. Either way, when the operator did reach her, Eagle says she was on the sidewalk watching the flames grow larger and shattering windows. The firefighters were now coming down the street. Eagle was impressed by the firefighters' response time and makes it clear that her concerns are with the 911 call centre, not the fire department. People in emergency situations, she says, need to have a live person walk them through the situation. 'I do appreciate things get busy, but when I think about, particularly, aging people (in an emergency), I just don't think that's appropriate,' Eagle says. 'You don't know what's going on. You just don't know if anybody's coming, if anybody else knows.' Eagle believes the call centre needs more operators to avoid a repeat of what happened to her. 'It's time now to do something about this,' she says. 'Somebody's got to kick in some more money from somewhere to be able to answer these calls.' But Robinson says he has no concerns about being understaffed or that callers will sometimes get a recording instead of an operator. In this case, he says the operator's attempts to return Eagle's first call were made in a timeframe 'certainly within industry standards.' But Eagle says she was not the only one dismayed by the inability to get a live operator the night of the blaze. After hanging up after her first call to 911, she says, a neighbour who was driving down the street stopped to see her. He too called 911 and received a recording, Eagle says. 'He couldn't believe it. So he spun around in the middle of the road and he drove right up to the fire hall himself,' says Eagle. By then, the firefighters were just starting to arrive. Despite their quick response time, Eagle's home was destroyed by the fire.
