They want to know what protocols are in place and why they weren't followed on Monday when a call-taker couldn't find the address of the burning home in the computer system and failed to send firefighters out to look for the fire, Town Manager Michael Bornstein said in a letter to the chief of Palm Beach County Fire-Rescue.
Another factor that contributed to the delay was the county receiving only a single call on the fire. That resulted from a Lantana Police Department policy that kept additional calls from going to county dispatchers, even though those calls would have aided in finding the address, fire-rescue officials said.
"The Town Council and I are very upset and concerned about the implications of such a serious delay," Bornstein wrote. "This amount of time is totally unacceptable and is well beyond the average response time spelled out in our contract."
It usually takes about five minutes for firefighters to respond to a call in Lantana, Deputy Chief Steve Delai said. On Monday, it took nearly 12 minutes to dispatch firefighters and another five minutes for them to arrive at 317 S. Atlantic Drive.
Bornstein has asked to meet with Chief Brice Herman to figure out the disconnect between what was supposed to happen and what did happen.
"This type of review is a necessary part of addressing how County Fire-Rescue can assure the Town that this type of event will not happen again," he wrote in the Wednesday letter.
According to fire officials, the path a 911 call travels is similar to an assembly line, with the call-taker at the start.
That person is responsible for identifying the problem and figuring out where it's happening. They then pass the information on to the paging dispatcher who send outs the units. By the time the call is passed to the tracking dispatcher, units are on their way.
The process can be stalled a bit if an address can't be located, but takes about 90 seconds from beginning to end, officials said.
The address given to the call-taker is verified through the Computer-Aided Dispatch System, and the call is passed on. But, if the address doesn't show in CAD, the call-taker is supposed to ask a series of questions to try to find out where to send units. Such questions include what city are you in, what are the closest major intersections?
That didn't happened Monday, James Wehrle, Fire-Rescue quality control manager, said.
The call-taker took down the address and identified the problem -- structure fire -- but hung up before verifying it, he said. South Atlantic Drive is listed four different ways in county, state and federal records.
The call-taker tried to call back to get more information but there was no answer and efforts to investigate further were abandoned. "We were not as aggressive with that call as we should have been," Wehrle said.
Several things prompted the decision not to investigate further, Delai said. One was the prerecorded message heard by the call-taker that a one or the area code had to be dialed before the call could be completed when he called back, Delai said.
That's a message that typically accompanies cell phone calls from Broward or Martin counties because when calling a cell phone with a 561 area code, Delai said, you only have to dial the seven-digit number.
The call-taker "in that case took a mental short cut and said, `Oh, this must be a Broward call,'" he said. Because cell phones connect to the nearest tower, Fire-Rescue often gets calls from cities that bump against the Palm Beach County lines, such as Deerfield Beach.
The lack of calls regarding the burning Hypoluxo Island home also made the call-taker skeptical, officials said. Fire Rescue only received one call on the fire and the caller was a little ambivalent, Delai said.
"If they get additional calls, it helps to determine the severity of the incident," Capt. Don De Lucia said.
But they only got one call because the Lantana Police Department has a policy to only patch through one call on a particular incident, officials said. All 911 calls go to the local police agency before being routed to Fire-Rescue.
Still, fire officials aren't justifying what happened Monday.
"The result of our investigation indicates that despite the address issue, Station 37 in Lantana should have been dispatched upon receipt of the initial call," Herman said in a letter to the town manager. "Palm Beach County Fire Rescue ... [has] instituted ... training to ensure this type of situation does not occur again."
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