Austin Huguelet
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
(TNS)
Jul. 5—ST. LOUIS — City officials at a press conference Wednesday defended their response to a weekend incident where people reported calling 911 for a dying woman for more than an hour before help arrived, saying first responders did the best they could under the circumstances. They also said they are working diligently to fix longstanding problems with the system.
Public Safety Director Charles Coyle expressed regret for the death of 33-year-old Katherine Coen after a tree fell on her car in the Grove during storms Saturday afternoon, and said his department was continuing to investigate what happened to calls for help.
But he also reiterated that the 911 center was overwhelmed amid Saturday's thunderstorms, when heavy rains and gusting winds toppled trees, knocked out power lines and prompted minor flash flooding: More than 1,000 calls came in between 3-5 p.m., roughly double the normal load.
"That was too many calls for us to think that we could handle each one of them," he said.
The response from city officials followed an outcry from people at Saturday's scene who said they called 911 over and over as Coen was slipping away, but could not get through to a dispatcher. Those accounts renewed the spotlight on the system, which has struggled for several years with delays in picking up calls, and raised questions on years-old promises to fix it.
In the past three years, city officials, including Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, have offered pay raises, fixed system glitches and announced plans to tackle the longstanding separation of 911 centers for police and for St. Louis fire and emergency medical services, which they said created bottlenecks for a system where all calls are initially routed to police.
Still, by the start of this year, numbers hadn't improved much: More than a third of calls weren't being answered nearly quickly enough to meet the national standards. About a third of police dispatcher positions were vacant as of this spring; half of EMS positions, too.
But at a press conference Wednesday, Coyle separated Saturday's incident from those issues, casting it as a unique consequence of a "regional weather catastrophe" that swamped dispatches from St. Charles to Illinois. The city was also getting overflow calls from St. Louis County, he said.
He also insisted the city is making progress on a long-term fix. He said another round of raises just took effect that will boost recruitment efforts.
Calls are still being routed through the police 911 center, a setup that has long required an extra step when callers need fire or EMS services. But Coyle said the department now has software in place that kicks in when an operator is not immediately available, and asks callers to push 1 for EMS, 2 for fire, or hold for police.
He said the department has also gathered about three-quarters of the money it needs to build a new dispatch center where officials envision dispatchers will take calls as one unit, sometime in 2026. And he said there are plans to build a day care center for children of first responders, including dispatchers, in an effort to improve hiring and retention.
A city spokesman later said in an emailed statement that dispatchers did answer calls about Saturday's incident. A dispatcher for emergency medical service picked one up as early as 3:57 p.m., about 20 minutes after Sebastian Montes, a restaurant owner in the Grove, said people around him started calling 911 on Saturday.
A police dispatcher answered a call at 4:14 p.m., the statement said. And a fire service dispatcher answered a call at 4:16 p.m. Firefighters, stretched thin by the storm, were on scene 13 minutes later.
The statement did not say whether the earliest call to the EMS dispatcher prompted any response from paramedics or other first responders. City spokesman Nick Desideri said that is still under review.
But Coyle cast Saturday's events as the consequence of a "regional weather catastrophe" that overwhelmed 911 across the region. "I don't think you can put that in the same bucket as everything else," he said.
He also assured reporters that his department is working on fulfilling those promised changes.
He said the city has approved pay raises for dispatchers to make the high-stress jobs more appealing. He said the department is also making progress on a larger structural problem: the longstanding separation of 911 centers for police and for St. Louis fire and emergency medical services.
Calls are still being routed through the police 911 center, a setup that has long required an extra step when callers need fire or EMS services. But Coyle said the department now has software in place that kicks in when an operator is not immediately available and asks callers to push buttons for EMS or fire services if they need them.
He said the department has also gathered about three-quarters of the money it needs to build a new dispatch center where officials envision dispatchers will take calls as one unit, sometime in 2026. And he said there are plans to build a daycare center for children of first responders, including dispatchers, in an effort to improve hiring and retention.
But he conceded that staffing woes continue to plague operations. Budget figures show roughly a third of police dispatcher positions are vacant, and about half of EMS positions are. He said that gap is preventing the city from training fire and EMS dispatchers to take police calls, which officials have said would make the system more efficient.
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