Glitches Plague County’s Computerized Fire Dispatch System : Emergencies: In one case, a fireboat was ordered to Westlake Village. Officials say mistakes are few.

Capt. Bruce Collings at the Marina del Rey fire station remembers the time when the county’s new computer dispatch system ordered his seagoing fireboat to put out an on-board blaze at a lake in Westlake Village.

“We said, ‘OK, we’ll put it on the trailer and be right over,’ ” he laughed.

The computer didn’t know that Westlake is landlocked.

Critics of the sophisticated, $27-million system say there is a lot more that the computer and the people who operate it don’t know about putting out fires and rescuing accident victims in the 50 communities served by the Los Angeles County Fire Department.

They point to incidents in which rescuers have been sent to the wrong addresses, to the wrong streets, even to the wrong cities.

Two weeks ago, rescue units were sent to the Antelope Valley community of Valyermo instead of a doctor’s office in Lancaster, where a woman was having seizures. The street on which the doctor’s office was located had been misspelled in the computer’s database, a problem since corrected.

The percentage of incorrect dispatches is small. The county sends crews on 600 calls every day, and the vast majority are handled properly, the department says. But even one error can be life-threatening or result in prolonged pain.

“I live in this area,” said a firefighter in the Antelope Valley who asked not to be identified. “I think, ‘If my family calls for an emergency are we going to be able to respond to it?’ ”

County fire officials admit that there were bugs in the system, which became operative in February and changed the way calls for help are handled. In particular, there have been difficulties in the Santa Clarita and Antelope valleys, where population growth and local anomalies present unusual challenges to the computer and to the people operating it.

But county fire officials say that the system is getting better and that once it is running smoothly, it will be an improvement over the system it replaced.

“We believe that yes, there are problems, but I think we’re getting a lot better,” said John M. Cummings, assistant fire chief for the command and control division of the services bureau.

Already, the new system has cut the average emergency response time. “Every call is two minutes faster than under the old system. That can mean the difference between life and death,” Cummings said.

Yet, mistakes and complaints from firefighters continue.

The Los Angeles County Fire Department is the nation’s third largest, behind the city departments of Chicago and New York. On the Westside, it serves the unincorporated communities of Marina del Rey, View Park, Windsor Hills and Ladera Heights, and the cities of Malibu and West Hollywood. Until this year, it relied on a 1975-era computer system designed to handle 35,000 calls a year.

In recent years, the number of calls has risen to 180,000 annually. The department aims to get calls out in 85 seconds, but the average under the old system had grown to three minutes.

“The old system was failing,” Cummings said.

In 1987, a contract for a new system was awarded to PRC Public Management Services Inc., based in McLean, Va. PRC, which has offices in Orange County, has designed 150 dispatch systems for police and fire departments in Canada, Ireland and the United States.

The old system relied on voice communication, whereas electronic commands control the new system, Computer Aided Dispatch, or CAD, speeding up the handling of calls in a major emergency.

In a typical call, a 911 operator transfers the request for help to a county fire operator, who records the information and pushes a button to send it to the dispatcher. The dispatcher pushes a button that alerts appropriate units in the field to respond.

Firefighters receive the information on terminals and communicate directly with the computer by pushing buttons on their own mobile terminals to signal when they have arrived at a fire scene and when they have returned to the station.

In addition to buying the new computer system, the department consolidated its three dispatch centers in downtown Los Angeles, the San Gabriel Valley and the Antelope Valley for efficiency’s sake. Calls for help from all over the county are answered from a second-floor room in a new building in East Los Angeles, where dispatchers sit in front of banks of new computer terminals.

Finally, civilian dispatchers were hired to replace the firefighters who had been doing the work under the old system.

With all these changes occurring about the same time, there were bound to be problems, according to Tom Clark, a battalion chief in San Diego, which also has a new PRC-designed dispatch system.

Shortly after the Los Angeles County system went on line in February, problems surfaced. On March 29, Cummings sent a blistering memo to dispatchers and battalion chiefs stating that four incidents were either not dispatched or had considerable delay. “The department cannot tolerate this level of performance,” the memo said.

None of the four incidents resulted in death, said Cummings, but he admits that “I was upset at that point.” Some dispatchers “weren’t quite as conscientious as they should have been,” he said.

Although complaints involving incorrect dispatches and delays have died down in the L.A. Basin, Cummings said, they are still heard in the Antelope Valley.

“Every time we have a problem they say it won’t happen again,” one Antelope Valley firefighter said about the dispatch center. “Then it does. It’s frustrating.”

The complaints are echoed outside the firefighting community.

“We hear the frustration being vented by the paramedics,” said Victoria Helmandollar, director of the emergency room at Antelope Valley Hospital in Lancaster.

The hospital staff met with paramedics recently to review emergency procedures, and some staff members complained about the dispatch problems.

As the meeting ended, an emergency call came in. “Right out of the meeting they were dispatched to the wrong address,” Helmandollar said. “I would have thought it would be better now.”

“Is there a problem still going on? Yes there is,” Cummings said. But he insists that things are improving even in the high desert.

There remains some confusion, however, over which units are needed to handle a particular emergency, according to critics.

The fireboat incident in Marina del Rey, for instance, happened because whoever took the call listed it as a boat fire, even though the boat was on dry land. The computer automatically dispatched Collings’ fireboat, unaware that there were mountains between Westlake Village and the ocean.

These problems lead the critics to ask why the county switched to civilian dispatchers when firefighters did the job well.

Cummings said this is a misconception. He said that errors were not uncommon under the old system but that they weren’t as obvious.

Also, he said, civilian turnover is only 10%, compared to 40% for firefighters, who regarded dispatch work as a temporary assignment until they could get out in the field.

“I will take the blame for one point,” Cummings said. “I should have hired 10 more” dispatchers in the beginning.

A shortage of dispatchers has forced the department to require employees to work overtime. “A lot of folks are working 60 hours a week,” said Cummings, and one dispatcher said she put in 90 hours of overtime last month.

“That is not good in this environment,” Cummings admitted. New dispatchers are being trained, and Cummings said the problems are being alleviated.

The new system puts a greater burden on the firefighters, who are supposed to keep the dispatch center up to date on their activities via the computer. If they forget, and some do, the computer loses track of them. “The onus is on them and some of them don’t like it,” one ranking Fire Department official said.

Even many of the critics believe that the bugs will be worked out of the system and that it will be everything that was promised. For now, however, complaints are being heard.

“The bottom line is the old system worked,” an ambulance company employee said. “This one works, but its kind of like a car with a flat on one side.”

“I think it’s working better each day, week and month,” Cummings said. Asked whether he is happy with the performance so far, he replied, “I’m happy with its performance, but I’m never satisfied.”