Rush job

Better late than never? Sure — but “late” is not the word you want to have associated with your call to 911.

Thursday, the provincial government and the City of St. John’s reached a deal on 911 service as part of the plan to put provincewide 911 in place by tomorrow. The agreement means the St. John’s Regional Fire Department will, as originally planned, handle all 911 calls east of Goobies, while Corner Brook emergency services will handle calls west of that point.

Problem is, the city and the province have been fighting over budgets and other issues, and it looked for a while like the city’s service wouldn’t be part of the new system.

With the agreement, the Corner Brook site will handle some Eastern calls until some time in mid-March, and then the St. John’s Regional Fire Department will re-assume full 911 service for this region.

Certainly it’s good news that the two sides were able to work out their differences — but you have to ask whether having a temporary service in place for a few weeks is a better idea than simply delaying the launch until the full service is ready to go.

After all, 911 is a crucial service for both emergency responders and the general public. The St. John’s system is already well experienced and knowledgeable about a large portion (in population, anyway) of the area they will be covering.

For the Corner Brook centre, the eastern Avalon will be new and different — and there are a huge variety of issues that 911 operators face that few people even stop to consider. First, callers are rarely calm and collected; they are calling in high-stress situations, and are often difficult to understand.

There are other pitfalls, too. In rural areas of the province, many homes don’t have clearly posted street numbers, and fire departments are often dispatched to addresses like “the blue house four down from the store.” And that’s just the beginning. Think about this: from Victoria, Conception Bay North to Northern Bay Sands, there are a series of small towns, almost every one of them boasting a Station Road, roads left over from the old rail line days.

At least one fire department in the region has three different Station Roads within its boundaries.

There’s a lot for 911 operators to sort out, especially from the other side of the province entirely.

This is not to suggest that Corner Brook’s 911 emergency services aren’t professional and prepared — it’s more a question of why it’s more important to launch on March 1 than it is to have the most familiar 911 workers handling calls.

In a business where every second counts, it’s hard to understand why it would not be better to miss the province’s March 1 launch, and instead bring the full system online — including the late-arriving St. John’s regional system — at the same time.