This was going to be an update to the prior Houston Emergency Center article, but frankly, it got too long, so I have split it into its own post. KHOU is also looking into the H.E.C.’s problems, and it looks a lot worse than a couple of isolated incidents. “A systematic failure of management philosophy and direction from the various governments responsible for supporting the 9-1-1 system,” would be a better description.

The 11 News Defenders have exposed possible trouble with emergency calls for help, discovering thousands of 911 callers might not be getting an answer.

When you need the help of 911, you need it right now, not later.

But that’s what we found, tens of thousands of cases in which emergency operators didn’t answer when they were supposed to.

What’s more, the city isn’t doing much about it.
(snip)
Since the emergency center opened, the 11 News Defenders discovered more than 81,000 calls took longer than 20 seconds to answer. But again, just how long or for what kind of emergency, the city doesn’t track.

11 News Defenders: “So in other words, year after year goes by, and tens of thousands of calls are over 20 seconds to answer, and nobody knows anything about them?” Cutler: “Correct.”
11 News Defenders: “And life goes on?”
Cutler: “Yes.”

Now, if it gets answered in 21 seconds or even 25 seconds, normally I’d say B.F.D. It goes in the “miss” column but it isn’t that big. Until I start to wonder why the goal is twenty seconds. How many rings is that?

Worse, it’s perfectly obvious that no one wants to know much about the misses, like why they happen, what kind of calls they were, or anything else about them for that matter. That’s a tactic that looks VERY familar to me, since I spent nearly 15 years under a management that engaged in it constantly. If you don’t have the information, you can honestly answer that you don’t have it. (The Assistant Director that told me that is no longer with the city. Thankfully.) The other half of the trick is to define your categories of information that you do keep in such a way as to be meaningless. Essentially, the numbers give a false picture because they’re measuring the wrong thing. Then bad budget and policy decisions get made with the wrong numbers, which means that even more “re-tooling” is necessary to keep the numbers looking good, and the next thing you know, you’re facing a disaster. My department is a multi-year recovery from that, driven in part by Mayor White’s performance initiatives, and partly by the changes in managment after the Great Retirement Slaughter of 2004. And some of the bad decisions made won’t be recovered from at all because they were capital expenditures and now we’re stuck with the results of such a poor decision-making process.

But the H.E.C. goes beyond the pale is in their willingness to play “hide the football.”

And when we asked the city for the information? We were shocked by this: An estimate of charges for $458,000.

The city’s legal department said it would take 158 months — 13 years –because the city claims the only way to do it is to print out a million records page by page.

Oh, good lord. How f—king stupid do they think we are? Write a damn program to tally all the records and summarize it. I know it isn’t going to be easy, but if the raw data is in there, it can be gotten out. Obviously, it won’t all be in the system at once; there’s going to be a whole lot of tapes pulled out of archives and run through the system, but there’s got to be a system for it, otherwise, why bother keeping the records?

But the city claims it can’t be gotten out easily:

But the county claims there’s no quick and easy way to get the information from the 911 computer system.

“Whoever designed the computer program at the beginning, at the outset of this, apparently didn’t think it was important to look at that,” said [H.E.C. Director] Cutler.

So we even asked about rewriting a computer program, but that would have to come from the Harris County 911 Network, which provides the hardware and software.

“It would be up to us to contact the manufacturer about the cost of creating a program,” said Lavergne Schwender, Greater Harris County 911.

But that has yet to happen, despite our requests months ago.

Yet emergency officials maintain that there is no attempt to hide this information.

I’d laugh but I feel more like crying at the abysmal stupidity behind that statement. They really do believe that they are not trying to hide this information. How can this be? (For he is the Quizach Haderach! . . . . Oops, sorry; was having flashbacks to my time as a freman.) Well, have you noticed something? The city this, the county that, the Greater Harris County 911 the other. . . the geographical coverage mandates that everyone is involved, which in turn means that no one is responsible. Add a top-down hierarchy in which information is power (and it’s availability is a vulnerability), and you have a recipie for everyone trying not to know anything, because if they did know anything, they’d have to do something about it. If they could get away with not knowing that 81,000 calls missed the goal, they’d do it in a heartbeat. But that’s too much to swallow; instead they set up a system that can track the barest minimum of information. A “happiness stat.” Some politician asks a simple question, and the management can give them a simple answer. Everyone goes away happy.

In other words, they’re not trying to hide information, they just are hiding it because it’s just part and parcel to who and what they are, and how they think. Asking bureaucrats like this why they hide information is like asking a fish why it swims. It doesn’t try to swim, it just does.

The article illustrates a worst-case scenario by covering a single incident involving a church that burned down, and the unsuccessful attempts by its pastor to get some answers as to why his phone call was not picked up.

Eventually, a friend of Pastor Clements called 911 and got an answer, but records show it took 14 minutes for a fire truck to show up at the scene.

And I thought the police response was getting bad.

But the director of Houston’s Emergency Center points out there was stormy weather that night and operators were trying to handle more than double the normal call volume.

HONK!!! They’ve got records of the weather and the call volume, but now how long the calls took to be answered?

He also claims that answering 98 percent of 911 calls in 20 seconds is one of the best performance records in the country.

I’d feel a lot better about that if I knew that other emergency centers were keeping better records than this. Really.

Ok, just how bogus is this? Here’s how bogus:

The Utility Customer Service branch of Public Works and Engineering is responsible for receiving all telephone calls and email regarding water/sewer bills for over 440,000 accounts. They maintain a call center of their own, dedicated to this task. Their software tracks all incoming calls that get answered, as well as all incoming calls that do not get answered, because the customer chose to use the automated systems or just hung up while waiting. How long they held prior to hanging up is also recorded. Records are kept for daily performance, including how many representatives were on the phones, who they were, how many calls each handled, how long it took them to pick up calls, how long it took them to handle the call, the queue of the call (did the customer come in through english/spanish/commercial/other lines) and several other factors.

Now I can’t guarantee that all the data is recorded for each and every call (though I think it is), but I know for a fact that daily averages and totals are kept, and specifically, how many calls went over the goal and by how long (roughly, in 30 sec. blocks) is tracked. Not only that, but what “half-hour window” of the day that the calls happened in.

Using this information, UCS can generally predict how many employees they need on average and for peak periods, Further if someone complains to council about long wait times, a strong case can be made that staffing is adequate for normal needs but the problem is that everyone calls in at the start of the workday and at lunch, or on Mondays, etc. (Specific individuals may not, but at this level you’re dealing in statistical data, and a hella lot do call at the worst time.)

Such capability isn’t cheap and they didn’t always have it. Back in 2001, a serious heat wave resulted in large increases in water usage, which meant large increases in bills, and that meant lots and lots of phone calls coming in. Budget cuts under Brown left the center with as few as a dozen employees on some mornings, resulting in wait times, according to the system, of 10 to 20 minutes. Yet customers routinely reported waiting over an hour — worse, the phone system often became so overloaded that it would collapse, disconnecting everyone in the queue and resetting itself.

How could this happen? Because of what I said above: bad number tracking causing bad decisions making. The system didn’t track enough information, and what it did track was often wrong because of the system overloads caused data to be lost. Even when that wasn’t the case, poor data tracking by the system and worse handling by people ignorant of basic statistics screwed things up.

That was an unacceptable situation, and it was addressed through upgrading of the infrastructure and training of employees responsible for compiling the reports–and this is by a department that has to do nothing more important than handle utility bills.

Pity the folks that are responsible for dispatching critical emergency services aren’t as sensible.