Emergency at 911 — understaffing

City’s call center is supposed to have 180 dispatchers, but it has only 105

Adam Gutterman knows the terror of dialing 911 in San Francisco and having nobody answer the phone.

Several months ago, he and his wife were watching television in their Noe Valley apartment when they heard their upstairs neighbor screaming. They also heard loud thumps, as if a fight or struggle was happening.

“I knew something was wrong, we both did,” recalled Gutterman, a 40-year-old who works in business development at Google Play. “We called 911. It just kept ringing and ringing.”

It’s hard to imagine a more basic city service than somebody answering when you dial 911, but the incessant ringing isn’t unusual. There simply aren’t enough dispatchers to take the calls, even in one of the richest cities in the world — one with a $9.6 billion annual budget.

I told you this week about a man who suffered cardiac arrest and collapsed at St. Boniface Church on April 6. Three people called 911 immediately and said it just kept ringing. They eventually got through and an ambulance arrived, but the man died when taken off life support six days later.

During last Friday’s massive power outage, which left about 90,000 Pacific Gas and Electric Co. customers in the dark, there were just nine dispatchers taking calls, pretty average for a weekday morning. The department went into its “surge” procedure during the outage, and eventually 18 people, including six supervisors, were taking calls. Still, it wasn’t enough.

During the outage, 500 calls to 911 were abandoned, meaning the caller gave up before a dispatcher answered. Dispatchers did eventually call all those people back, but the Department of Emergency Man-

agement couldn’t say how long those return calls took or the effects of the lag time.

In February, between the hours of the 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift — roughly the duration of the power outage — there was a daily average of 44 abandoned calls, showing people are going to have a much harder time getting through to 911 during a big emergency.

“Good luck with an earthquake,” said Burt Wilson, the president of the dispatchers’ union.

The national standard is to answer 90 percent of 911 calls within 10 seconds, a target San Francisco met 74 percent of the time in March.

There are supposed to be 180 dispatchers on staff in San Francisco, but there are only 105. An additional four are on leave, and 56 are in training — a grueling, yearlong process that only 60 percent of people stick out. The pay ranges from $81,588 to $99,190 per year, depending on length of service.

So far, the trainees, who are fully paid, are helping the department merely tread water, since so many dispatchers retire, go on leave or quit. Wilson said dispatchers are so frustrated with being so overworked that many of them have retired early or left for another county.

City Hall has boosted the department’s funding from $43 million to $83 million per year over the past six years. The money has paid for technology improvements and more hiring, including three academy classes this year of about 15 people each.

Anne Kronenberg, executive director of the Department of Emergency Management, said the agency’s multiyear hiring plan should start paying dividends soon.

“I’m confident we will continue to be able to hire and build up our ranks until we are at the state we need to be,” she said.

The 911 dispatcher shortage is no secret — it was the subject of an investigation in The Chronicle in January. But still, the issue hasn’t been grabbed by any politicians.

Supervisor Mark Farrell said the shortage was news to him, calling it “shocking and amazing.”

Supervisor Aaron Peskin called it “totally unacceptable.”

“The basic, No. 1, bottom-line thing a city is supposed to do is provide emergency services,” he said.

Supervisor Malia Cohen agreed, saying, “You’re trained to call 911, and you have the expectation that someone will answer.”

Mayor Ed Lee visited the 911 call center Friday afternoon during the power outage. He said he believes working conditions rather than funding are the main concern.

“These are jobs that are very intense. They’re not ordinary call takers, so you can’t just pick them off of AT&T, for example, and put them in there,” he said. “It’s not just money, it’s also how to support them when they have a high-stress job.”

Adam Gutterman, who dialed 911 when he heard his neighbor screaming, said that as the phone kept ringing with no answer, he didn’t know what to do. He owns no weapons and wasn’t comfortable going to the apartment upstairs from where the screaming was coming.

So he and his wife went downstairs to the front door to ring the doorbell of the neighbor’s apartment, hoping it would create a diversion.

Finally, after what he said was more than two minutes, a dispatcher answered the phone. That’s when the two assailants raced down the steps and out the front door. They were gone by the time police arrived.

During that interminable ringing, one of the suspects was apparently trying to find valuables while the other one held down and choked Gutterman’s neighbor. The neighbor was taken to the hospital with major bruising around his neck.

“You pay taxes for these things, and you expect the services to be a little bit more well-refined and faster,” Gutterman said. “It makes me scared.”

Whatever the solution, City Hall needs to find it fast. Need inspiration, politicians? Imagine it’s your loved one being choked by a burglar or collapsing after a heart attack. Somebody calls 911 — only to hear it ring.

“These are jobs that are very intense. They’re not ordinary call takers . ... It’s not just money, it’s also how to support them when they have a high-stress job.” Mayor Ed Lee