Freeway Call Boxes: Help in a Variety of Languages

Orange County’s year-old system of freeway telephones has a problem--the dispatchers at California Highway Patrol headquarters in Santa Ana can’t understand many of the callers.

The 1,134 call boxes spaced every quarter of a mile along all the county’s freeways were used a record 13,500 times last month. About 10% of the callers, as many as 100 on some days, spoke only foreign languages, mostly Spanish or Vietnamese.

The dispatchers, however, speak only English.

“From the start, the number of people calling in foreign languages has surprised us,” said Todd Murphy, chairman of California SAFE (Service Authority for Freeway Emergencies), which handles wireless call boxes in California.

Murphy said that when the call box service was launched last September, officials expected to receive some calls in Spanish but never anticipated the volume and diversity of foreign language calls.

An interpreter center was retained to deal with non-English-speaking callers. When foreign language calls come into Santa Ana, the caller is patched into the interpretation facility--Communications and Language Line, based in Monterey, Calif.--and a three-way conversation takes place.

Flood of Calls

Company officials say they receive more demands for interpretation from Orange County than anywhere else freeway phones are used.

“From the very start we found that Orange County runs 30 to 40 different languages every month, about the same as in New York City,” said Mike McFerrin, information manager for Communications and Language Line, which can interpret in 143 languages. “We get more calls from call boxes in Orange County than we do from anywhere in the country.”

Although the center has had to deal with Orange County callers who speak only such languages as Romanian and Farsi, about half the foreign language calls are in Spanish. Although they can hook up by telephone with the interpretation service, Highway Patrol officials say they need Spanish speakers on staff to handle the heavy volume.

“The translation service is great, but it’s costly and slower than having somebody on hand,” said Lt. Rick Criner, manager of the Santa Ana communications center. “We need somebody on staff.

“It’s much better to have bilingual people on hand rather than to try and sort things out over three telephone lines. They are faster and they can save lives if they know CHP policies and procedures.”

Criner said the telephone center has had difficulty attracting Spanish-speaking applicants and that CHP regulations have hampered the hiring of Spanish speakers. Under department rules, bilingual dispatchers can be paid more after they are hired but can be given preference in hiring only if they are among the top three candidates, he said.

Last January, the CHP allocated extra money to be paid to two Spanish-speaking dispatchers in the Santa Ana office, but so far none has been hired. In June, the department held its first bilingual test for dispatchers. Of 20 applicants, four qualified and have been listed for hire, said CHP spokesman Keith Thornhill.

Orange County began to install the call box system in 1987 after the area’s 26 municipalities approved a $1 surcharge on motor vehicle registrations to pay for it.