Stories You Should Read

Phoenix, Ariz.:  A heart-attack victim suffered severe brain damage because her employer’s phone system kept coworkers from calling 9-1-1. Sarah H. Dugan suffered a heart attack and collapsed at a Phoenix office of American Express. Coworkers tried to call 9-1-1 to summon help. However, the phone system blocked 9-1-1 service because American Express wanted employees to call an in-house emergency number instead. No warnings about blockage of 9-1-1 service were posted on the phones. Emergency help was delayed, and Dugan suffered brain damage due to extended oxygen deprivation.
A lawsuit followed.

Chicago, Ill.:  A woman died in a fire at One Illinois Center, 111 East Wacker, because rescue workers were unable to find her location in the large, multi-story building. Her pleas to the dispatcher to send help to the 20^th floor were in vain. The search by rescue workers brought them within yards of her location, but when they finally found her, it was too late.

San Francisco, Calif.:  A gunman entered a high-rise, killed eight people and wounded six on three floors before encountering police and killing himself.  The man, angry due to a real estate deal gone bad, returned to the law firm of Petit & Martin with a “death list”.  He started shooting at people he encountered on the 34^th floor and continued down to the 33^rd and 31^st floors, leaving people to bleed to death.  As he made his way down to the 29^th floor in the stairwell, he met the police, who were searching for him floor by floor.  Due to a shared telephone system, the police dispatchers showed the incident as in the building next door.  Also, many of the initial calls were hang-ups either because the caller had been shot or was hiding.  Some callers were too hysterical to be able to accurately identify their exact location. Since many people were not employees, their ability to identify their location in the midst of the crisis was hindered.

St. Paul, Minn.:  An incident at the College of St. Catherine in St. Paul prompted campus authorities to install a Telident E9-1-1 solution because a student was threatening suicide and they were unable to locate the individual based on his phone number.  The police had to search the dorms, room by room until they found the student.

911 Glitch In County Phone Lines Scares Worker: Jayne Gilbertson was with a client Tuesday when the woman she was talking to was suddenly gripped by a seizure and fell to the floor. Gilbertson, an advocate in the Clay County Crime Victim Advocacy Program, rushed to the woman’s side, telling a co-worker to dial 911 to summon an ambulance. What followed, Gilbertson said, was a disconcerting moment of confusion. The reason: a glitch that has existed for years that causes 911 calls made from certain county properties to show up wrong on dispatch screens. To dispatchers, such calls appear to originate from a suite in the offices of the Clay-Wilkin Opportunity Council, which rents space in the Clay County Family Service Center in north Moorhead. The center is next door to Gilbertson’s office in the West Central Regional Juvenile Center. In Tuesday’s incident, Gilbertson said, there was a moment of uncertainty when the dispatcher asked questions to confirm the address of the call and it turned out to be different than what showed up on the dispatch screen. She said Moorhead police officer Dave Miller heard about the incident over his radio and helped clarify the situation, directing help to Gilbertson’s office and arriving at the scene himself shortly after the call was placed. Gilbertson said things turned out OK that time. But she said she is worried about what could happen some day. “I’m telling you, the experience that I had with the tremendous flaw in the system was very scary and it was a fresh dose of reality on the potential for harm,” she said. The glitch affects phones in the Clay County Courthouse, the juvenile detention center and the family service center, which rents space to a number of agencies, including the Rape and Abuse Crisis Center. Gilbertson said the problem presents particular dangers for the crisis center. “If they were to call 911 and hang up thinking help is on the way, or even if they didn’t hang up, let’s say they had an abuser follow one of their clients and he came in and disconnected that 911 call,” she said. “They’re still thinking help is on the way, naively.” Clay County Administrator Vijay Sethi said the Clay County Commission is looking closely at putting funds in next year’s budget to buy the software necessary to fix the problem. He said it is likely to happen but he added work probably won’t start until after the first of the year. Sethi said the county is in the process of upgrading phone hardware that will alleviate problems with local and long-distance service at the courthouse. He said at the present time, if a long-distance conference call is made the building’s long-distance lines may be tied up indefinitely unless someone resets the system after a call is made. He said hardware to fix that problem is scheduled to be installed soon. Sethi said officials have been aware of the 911 problem since a change was made to the system about seven years ago. He added he is not aware of any other incidents like the one that happened Tuesday. Sethi said when dispatchers receive a 911 call the procedure they use is to confirm where the call is coming from. He said that procedure was followed in Tuesday’s call and the response was prompt. Sethi said he could understand concerns someone might have regarding what would happen if someone can’t answer a dispatcher’s questions. Gilbertson put her own concerns this way: “If somebody is at the courthouse after hours and they’re the only ones in the building, they’re having a heart attack, they’ve managed to make it to the phone to dial 911 and can’t respond further than that. No one is probably going to get to them until it’s too late.” The 911 situation in the Moorhead School District was similar to the county’s until a special software product was installed last fall. Now, when a 911 call is made from a Moorhead school, dispatchers know which building it comes from and where in the building the call originated. Lynn Day, who works on the district’s technical projects, said any time a phone is moved in the district the change is noted in a master data base. “We are very on top of that,” she said. Gilbertson said the county should put a similar change in place soon. “We work for the public. We serve people who are in crisis. We serve people who are under stress and who are facing insurmountable problems in their life,” Gilbertson said. “If anyone should have a functional 911 system, it should be Clay County.”

¨       Nearly 1,000 people have sudden cardiac arrest daily.  Over 90% of them die, mostly because a life-saving defibrillator did not arrive within 5-7 minutes.    - American Heart Association 2/98

¨       In 1990 there were over 6 million work-related accidents resulting in over 60,000 permanent impairments and 10,000 deaths.    - American Red Cross 1990

¨       Over 500,000 people have strokes every year of which 150,000 people die.   
- American Red Cross 1990

¨       Over 2,000,000 people are victims of personal attacks in the workplace every year.  Of these, over 1,000 are killed.

¨       Nearly 25% of students and 11% of teachers have been victims of violence in or around school.

¨       Over 1,300 adults die yearly from choking.     - American Red Cross 1990

¨       It is getting tougher for businesses to defend themselves against lawsuits.

¨       Suits are typically filed by victims of violent crimes committed on business premises.

¨       Courts are now applying a new legal standard that allows jurors to consider a multitude of safety issues and makes it easier for victims to win suits.

¨       An eight (8) year study by Liability Consultants, Inc. found the average jury verdict:

·         for a rape on business premises awarded $1.2 million

·         for a death awarded $2.2 million

¨       In a robbery/shooting case, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that businesses do not have to guarantee patrons safety, but they must take all economically feasible steps to provide a reasonable level of security.  Scott Jacobs, editor of Mealey’s Litigation Report:  Premises Liability, said of the Kansas case, “This is a great ruling for victims of violent crimes, but a difficult one for property owners.”  He continued to say that the decision puts property owners in a position where they may have to beef up security.

¨       Management can no longer consider the corporate checkbook as the only possible target.  Owners and managers are now being held to a greater standard of care when the safety of their tenants, guests, employees and others is at risk.  Court decisions have held executives and managers who are in a position to make decisions affecting safety and security measures personally liable.

¨       About 1,400 workplace homicides occurred in 1993 according to U.S. Labor Department statistics.

¨      Homicide is the No. 1 cause of fatal on-the-job injury to women, and it is the No. 2 cause, behind vehicle accidents, for men.

¨      Suicide is the No. 1 cause of death in college aged people.