Long Beach 911 System in a State of Emergency

Long Beach’s 911 emergency dispatch system has fallen into such decay that it is “uncomfortably vulnerable” to a major breakdown, city officials say, and in the event of a catastrophe, police and fire departments warn they would be unable to offer timely aid.

Frequent equipment failures have caused the loss of radio contact for firefighters in burning buildings and the disconnection of dozens of 911 emergency calls at a time. Roof leaks in the city’s two dispatch centers have allowed rainwater to seep into rooms full of exposed wiring. Power failures and even routine maintenance work such as air-conditioning repairs have shut down parts of the network--which technicians say has no adequate electrical backup--for hours.

To save the emergency dispatch system from further collapse, the City Council voted earlier this month to place a $30-million bond measure on the November ballot to cover the cost of new radio equipment, telephones and electronics, along with a $14-million communications facility to house dispatch centers for both the police and fire departments, which now manage calls from separate buildings.

But supporters say they face an uphill battle to win approval for the measure among voters who have shown resistance to public safety bond measures. If it fails, city leaders say they will cut other services to pay for the upgrade.

Residents in need of rescue are for the moment forced to depend on a communications system patched together with corroded wires and spare parts. While the Police Department has grown into Los Angeles County’s third-largest law enforcement agency, it hasn’t replaced its emergency radio system since it was installed in 1978. The Fire Department, also the third-largest in the county, still uses custom-built radio dispatch consoles put into use in 1963.

Police and fire officials say they don’t know whether the obsolete equipment or regular blackouts have led to deaths or injuries, but acknowledge that their technical failures have caused delays and missteps. Fire Department Battalion Chief Jack Bender put it this way: “We’ve been lucky.”

Like Long Beach, most cites across the country, including Los Angeles, operate their own emergency response systems. In unincorporated sections of Los Angeles County, 911 calls are routed to individual sheriff’s stations. Emergency calls made from cellular phones are handled by the California Highway Patrol.

The Long Beach system is not the only one with problems. In the city of Los Angeles last year, more than 300,000 calls were abandoned by callers before 911 operators were able to answer them. And the CHP had nearly a hundredfold increase in calls between 1985 and 1995 due to the cellular phone boom, resulting in increasing numbers of motorists getting busy signals during peak hours.

In Long Beach, officials were first officially alerted to the weak spots in their system in 1991, when a consultant’s report declared the police and fire facilities and technology in a “state of critical need.” But council members said adding police officers was a higher priority at the time.

Now, city officials are mounting a campaign to warn of what could happen if the emergency systems and buildings are not replaced. But they find themselves having to plead for support while being careful not to publicly blame the existing equipment for any current danger.

Said Councilman Les Robbins, a county sheriff’s deputy: “It’s not something we’re proud of. There’s always the potential of litigation there.”

The city has failed twice in the last six years to win approval for public safety bonds. In 1990 and 1992, voters rejected new taxes to add more police officers, and the city ultimately paid to expand the Police Department by slashing other services.

Bill Pearl, chairman of Citizens For Safer Long Beach, said he will vote against the measure because he fears it does not legally bind the city to build the new communications center once it receives the new tax revenue, and does not specify when it would issue the bond.

“It guarantees the levy of a tax promptly, but doesn’t guarantee the new facility,” said Pearl, citing the delay in Los Angeles, where police have yet to break ground on two new dispatch centers three years after voters approved a $235-million bond issue to pay for them.

If voters approve the Long Beach bond measure in November, they would agree to shoulder a new annual property tax averaging $12.35 per household, according to city estimates, and a new tax on businesses amounting to $11.60 per employee, with the tax capped at 100 employees. To pass, the measure must be supported by two-thirds of the voters. If it is approved, city officials say, the new facility would be online in 1999.

The city’s track record with such bonds, coupled with the complexity of the internal technical problems, means that “we’ve got a real salesmanship job ahead of us,” Robbins said. “The average citizen does not understand. They just know that if they call 911 and they don’t get through, seconds mean the difference between living and dying. You need a system that is not going to let you down.”

The extent of the system’s defects may not be apparent to most residents because the majority of 911 emergency calls are answered within 10 seconds. But technicians say once the operator takes the call, and the internal machinery of the city’s rescue system begins to whir, there are several points when information can be lost or miscommunicated in radio communications between dispatchers and rescuers in the field.

Both agencies are rife with tales of technical failures that have plagued the equipment and facilities for years.

There was the chilly night a few years ago when an unsuspecting fire employee plugged in a floor heater and overloaded the electrical system, knocking out the radio consoles for several minutes. And this month, the regional blackout shut down the police consoles and forced dispatchers to run outdoors to use walkie-talkies to manage officers in the field because there was no adequate back-up.

“The potential is there for it to go down and never come back,” said Lt. Richard Lacey, commander of the police communications center.

The police center, which receives all 911 calls and then transfers fire and medical emergencies to its Fire Department counterpart, handled a record 656,188 calls last year for police and other services. Its technology was built to handle 350,000 calls. Similarly, fire officials say their dispatch center handled 49,200 calls last year on technology designed for 5,000.

Around the clock, police officers and firefighters work with a radio network that is constantly hindered by increasing traffic on the airwaves and carry radios that are incompatible with the ones used by other public safety agencies in the county.

Among the new equipment promised in the bond are new digital radios that will pick up “narrow band” channels that the Federal Communications Commission is expected to put into public use by the end of the decade. Police and fire officials say they need the new channels to relieve airwave congestion.

Meanwhile, the dispatch centers suffer from the regular loss of electricity in the overtaxed wiring to breakdowns in the fire station intercoms. Even the call sequencer--the device that plays a “please don’t hang up” recording to 911 callers who are placed on hold--has broken five times in the past 18 months, police officials said.

Among other practical results, loss of radio communications has meant that dispatchers had to share channels, which often causes miscues because they must oversee a fire or crime response while simultaneously managing regular radio traffic.

According to a log of equipment failures kept by Fire Chief Harold Omel, there have been more than 130 “missed transmissions”--occasions when radio contact between firefighters and dispatchers was broken--since January.

“Obviously, when you’re responding and you have to ask two or three times for an updated address, there could be time delays,” Omel said.

The dispatch centers themselves offer silent testimony to the potential for disaster.

At the fire communications center, located in a bullet-pocked brick building in one of the city’s gang-torn neighborhoods, three dispatchers sit at the aging gray-green consoles 24 hours a day. Overhead, an “On The Air” sign reminiscent of a 1960s broadcast studio lights up when a dispatcher talks to a fire station. More than once, tourists looking for the Long Beach Fire Department Museum, which houses Depression-era fire engines and other antiques in a building next door, have wandered into the dispatch center and mistaken it for an exhibit, fire officials said.

Technicians say that what blueprints remain for the 33-year-old circuitry are now illegible. Only two city-employed technicians know how to repair certain parts, and the city’s wireless communications division reports that it has identified more than 90 flaws in the fire station alerting system, from ripped cables to shorted circuits, this year alone.

“We really cannot prepare for something going south on us,” said Deputy Fire Chief Ky S. Azlein, who heads the support services division. “The whole nature of the 911 system is to provide a safety net. Without reliability, that safety net has gaping holes.”