111 faults

Hundreds of calls fail

Fire and Emergency New Zealand has launched a review of its management of 111 calls on the night of a major storm in April that cut power to 200,000 homes in Auckland and cost insurers $72 million.

The review will determine whether any action is needed to manage future emergencies of that scale after 795 of the 111 calls were abandoned during transfer from an automated answering system.

Every abandoned call was followed up when capacity allowed.

In one instance a caller waited 28 minutes from the time of their call until a fire appliance was dispatched to a potentially life-threatening situation where a person was trapped by a tree that fell on a house.

It comes at the same time as Auckland Council announced it would also conduct a review of the response by the city’s emergency management agencies to the storm.

In total there were 2412 calls to Fire and Emergency between 6pm, April 10 and 4pm, April 11, when 140km/h winds and heavy rain ripped across Auckland and parts of New Zealand.

The weather event has been recorded as the fifth biggest storm this century.

At 8.46pm on April 10 all incoming police, fire and ambulance emer- gency calls were switched to an Interactive Voice Response [IVR] system.

The automated system was set up to assist emergency operators to manage high call volumes during major events by triaging them to the appropriate agency, Fire and Emergency office of the chief executive director Leigh Deuchars said.

The system answers 111 calls and gives callers a choice of agency, relying on callers to enter the correct corresponding number for the emergency service they need.

However 795 calls transferred to Fire and Emergency through the IVR system were abandoned during the Auckland Storm event, Deuchars admitted in information released to the

under the Official Information Act. Deuchars said the calls were either dropped because of the length of time they went unanswered or because the caller hung up.

She said Fire and Emergency could not determine the portion of calls that fell into the two categories but that every abandoned call was returned.

“For every call . . . abandoned the caller was contacted as soon as [call] centre staff had capacity.”

Of 23 calls that went to St John instead of Fire and Emergency and had to be transferred to fire communications staff, four were prioritised as potentially lifethreatening situations. One involved a person trapped in a house by a fallen tree. The call was made at 9.12pm, transferred at 9.32pm and an appliance dispatched at 9.40pm.

In announcing the independent review of Auckland’s emergency management agencies, mayor Phil Goff said the April storm was a “wakeup call” for Aucklanders to be prepared for increasingly more frequent weather events.

The review, scoped by Auckland Civil Defence and emergency management co-ordinating executive group, and endorsed by the council’s civil defence and emergency management committee, will identify successes and areas for improvement as well as any steps that could be taken to mitigate future risks.