911 director suspended for siren failure (updated)
On Thursday morning, the Dubois County Commissioners suspended 911 Director Janice Love due to the recent failure of the tornado warning sirens.
On Jan. 30 a tornado warning was issued for the southeast portion of Dubois County and when dispatchers attempted to activate the alarms, they didn’t sound.
Love’s investigation into the issue revealed a conflict between two systems at the communications center interfered with the sirens being activated. A warning system in the communications center notifies the dispatchers of a tornado warning with an audible alarm as well as a signal on the dispatchers’ monitors.
During the Jan. 30 tornado warning the dispatcher did not acknowledge the alarm before attempting to activate the warning sirens. Both systems use the same frequency for their transmissions and it was found that the warning signal would not allow the page to the sirens to be made.
The commissioners stated Love should have had a step-by-step procedural system in place that would have prevented the problem. “She should have had a procedure in place that said, one-you do this, two-you do this,” Commissioner Larry Volmer said. “We met and came to the agreement we needed to discipline her because she is ultimately responsible for the training of the dispatchers.”
Vollmer has pushed for a complete inspection of the 911 Communications Center since then. According to Vollmer, a consultant from Indianapolis will be inspecting the radio and dispatch system. He would have been at the communications center Thursday, but the weather forecast cancelled the visit.
The specialist, Vollmer stated he did not want to identify the individual at this time, is scheduled to inspect the communication center within a week. The specialist will also hold a public meeting with the fire chiefs in the county about any communications issues they may have identified.
“There may not be any issues brought up,” Vollmer said, “and he may not have any recommendations for the communications center. It may all be human error but we want to be sure.”
A meeting with the county fire fighters is scheduled for Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the Dubois County Emergency Management office in the lower level of the Courthouse Annex.
The consultant is meeting with the fire fighters and inspecting the communications center at no cost to the county.
Love will be suspended one week without pay from March 11 to 15.
They suspended her during Tornado season??? That’s seems logical….
The people that are complaining should buy a NOAA weather alert radio and place it by your bed. I think the EMA office will help you with programming. Or better yet buy a scanner and tune to 147.195 Mhz and listen to the ham radio spotters during severe weather operating under a SKYWARN net. You probably would not hear a tornado siren while you are sleeping or in the house anyway. I am not sure why the sirens are not on a different frequency dedicated solely for that purpose.
This review by an outside firm to evaluate the Dubois County communications is well over due. Just talk with some of the people, fire, sheriffs, and ems who use the system. The are always having problems or issues
The general public does not know about the problems that are going on. It’s not just the sirens. There is a problem with the radio system. There have been at least two times that we know of where the fire repeater has been down for a long period of time. This system is the one that pages the fire departments and EMS. Which means that our county fire departments and ambulances were unable to be called out, or even able to talk from truck to truck while responding to runs. This is a problem that could have resulted in the loss of property or even worse a life. It’s about time something is being done.
Nothing about this action is “logical” – not the timing or the level of discipline. First, while certain aspects of this are public record under various acts , it’s a personnel issue – not for such open and public discussion of the specific details, et al. Second, unless it can be proven that she outright lied (she didn’t) about the what and how of this, and in which case if she did she should be fired, to suspend her for a week without pay – an employee since 1996 with no prior actions of any type against her – was not called for. A verbal reprimand or letter of warning and corrective action to her file for now would have been more appropriate, rather than the knee-jerk actions of “we have to do something” before too much longer so let’s suspend a long-time supervisor with an unblemished record before all the facts are known in order to look like we’re in control and we (don’t) know what we’re doing.
Yes, there are many “should have” and “what if” scenarios, but thankfully in this case there was no harm or similar ramifications. Use it to learn and improve, and the outside firm analysis is a good start, I agree. Let that be part of the investigation before pulling the trigger on a disciplinary action of this type – it might reveal other issues as well that either work for or against her, the procedures, etc.
I agree. The evaluation of the system is overdue. However, the evaluation will probably show the system is very adequate. There might be some small recommendations. For the amounty of money that the county wants to spend on the system, the pieced together system that the firefighters, ems, and sheriff department employees complain about, is just what they’ve requested over the years. And now they complain they system is too complicated.
There was a problem with coverage 10 years ago, and the chiefs wanted something done. There was no fire repeater in Dubois County. They wanted better, so Janice had a repeater installed on Greener Rd–just like they wanted. Then there were some firefighters complaining that this wasn’t good enough, so they added another repeater in St Henry. The county was required to narrowband last year, which reduced the coverage again. So another repeater is being added now in the Dubois area.
The problem 2 years ago with the sirens in Celestine unveiled another issue. So a new tornado warning function was added to the system to appease the counsel, which added another problem. Discovered last month was a software problem that the radio manufactuer did not even know about. Just as most people discover, when they work with new software, it doesn’t always work exactly as planned. There are always issues and unforseen glitches with software. This was a first for both the dispatch center and the radio company, which is a very reputable company. They have since determined that the tornado warning function can be tested, but in order to perform the test, the fire frequency must be disabled.
Of course there can always be better, at much more cost. As for the firefighter that complained his life is at risk, on facebook, he probably has a cell phone for communication. He can dial 911 and get dispatch just like anyone else, including the person who originally called. And it won’t even cost him a dime, or he can turn his channel on his radio to another frequency and still get to dispatch. He just wants to jump on the bandwagen and act as if he knows what he is talking about. He apparently doesn’t know or understand the radio system but only talks on the radio when needed.
The coverage problem is being adressed. The comissioners do not understand how the system works. Nor do they realize the same leader they reprimanded is the same leader (for the past 23 years) that ensures the ambulance for their ailing mother or father gets paged, or the fire in their house gets the fire department sent to it every day, night, weekend, and holiday without fail. I invite anyone to compare the level of quality care Dubois County dispatch does provide without flaw on a daily basis to the emergency service provided by any surrounding county, or for that matter, to Southern Indiana.
From my vantage point here in Oklahoma the suspension sounds like an unnecessary knee-jerk reaction by officials to a problem which has been identified and corrected. From what I’ve been reading online the county recently changed their siren activation policy to no longer alert for severe thunderstorm warnings –a move likely prompted by the realization that people don’t pay attention to sirens when they are sounded for every garden variety thunderstorm. This was a smart move. So now it seems like there’s another problem. The actual activation system has some sort of acknowledging interlock that potentially prevents the sirens from being set off unless the right set of circumstances are met. This sounds like an engineering issue which needs to be addressed so that dispatchers can easily activate the sirens with one or two keystrokes and no other system will potentially conflict with the outgoing paging. Systems which are used infrequently need to be simple because people forget how to do things and in the heat of the moment there can be a lot of confusion.
If Love had failed to activate the sirens because she was out smoking a cigarette during a tornado warning or watching TV in the break room then a suspension would have been in order. Here, a procedural issue was identified and apparently corrected yet the commissioners deemed it necessary for someone fall on their sword. This seems like a spineless act to me but then again I don’t have all the facts so I can’t say for certain there weren’t other contributing factors that haven’t been made public.