A Christmas Day ocean rescue in waters off Cambria may trigger some needed improvements in emergency communications.
Bob Putney, chief of the Cambria Fire Department, was first on the scene at Leffingwell Landing -- off Moonstone Beach Drive -- about 2 p.m., but only because he'd been monitoring a countywide emergency channel.
Cambria Fire and North Coast Ocean Rescue Team are the closest responders to the area, where kayaker Randall Young of San Miguel was stranded and struggling in cold ocean water. But the two rescue groups weren't officially sent to the scene by dispatchers. Instead, a local resident called Fire Capt. Steve Bitto at home, who then called out the team.
And one person who called 911 to report the situation apparently was told that the Coast Guard had been dispatched -- from Morro Bay, a good half-hour away by sea.
A dispatcher at the Highway Patrol 911 central in San Luis Obispo also had routed the call to state park rangers and the Hearst Castle Fire Department. However, based at the castle's hilltop location, that department is about 15 minutes away.
"I'm going to get to the bottom of this," a determined Putney said Monday, as he collected dispatch logs, call-out times and other data. But because of holiday scheduling, he had been unable to get some needed pieces of the puzzle by press deadline.
So far, he's determined that, if all the agency clocks prove to be coordinated, the first emergency report came in by cell phone at 1:47 p.m., but the weak signal kept dropping the call. The first land-line call came in at 1:54 p.m., but the caller was so distraught, it took the dispatcher time to determine exactly what was happening and where.
Putney will report on the issue at the January meeting of the county's Coastal Incident Response Plan committee, "so we can prevent this from happening again," he said. The committee, one of the few like it in the state, includes all agencies that respond to such incidents, such as fire departments, harbor patrols, law enforcers, state parks officials, CHP and others.
In the meantime, Putney already is pushing for some changes.
Boaters, swimmers and kayakers have frequent problems in the waters off Leffingwell Landing, an area notorious for having poor cell phone coverage. Many people who visit there don't really know where they are and merely report to dispatchers that "I'm on the coast in Cambria," or "I'm at the state park beach," of which there are several in the area.
And many witnesses don't call 911 to report what they see.
"So many people go out alone from that area," Putney said, as Young did, and Leffingwell is the only launch area for the North Coast.
Putney wants the state Department of Parks and Recreation to install and maintain some signs near the boat-launch ramp and the beach that identify the area as Leffingwell Landing and that remind people to call 911 in an emergency.
He wants a special phone at the site that connects directly to the Sheriff's Department 911 system, rather than the CHP system that covers several counties.
And Putney wants people to remember that, in an emergency, dispatchers would rather hear from a dozen witnesses than from nobody.
"You can't make the assumption that the other person is going to call. That's what happened here," the fire chief said. "There were from 12 to 30 people at the scene. In the first 15 minutes of this incident, nobody called it in, even though the man was blowing on a whistle to get people's attention. Everybody assumed someone else had done it. That man could have drowned before anybody called.
"Any day you can save someone's life is a good day," he said, "but we can do it better. And we will."
