Mon, Feb 02, 2004
Sheriff: Everything That Could Have Gone Wrong Did Go
Wrong
If it could have gone wrong, it did. That's the word from
Sarasota County (FL) Sheriff Bill Balkwill in the case of a botched
911 call that left a downed Cessna 150 undiscovered for almost 20
hours last month. The 911 operator who handled the call has been
suspended, he says, and has asked to be reassigned.
It all started January 27th, when Cindy Toepfer and her husband,
Sheldon, were sitting on their back porch near the Venice (FL)
Airport. They heard the aircraft overhead -- but something didn't
sound right. Cindy said the engine was sputtering. After living
under flight patterns for 20 years, she knew something was wrong.
Then she heard -- or rather, felt -- the impact as the Cessna 150
crashed into a thick forest near her home.
So she dialed 911. But instead of getting information pertinent
to the accident, the operator gave Cindy the number for the
Domestic Air Interdiction office in Riverside (CA). That was around
7:30 pm EST. It wasn't until after relatives of the two men on
board reported them missing that a search was finally launched at
around 3:00 am EST the next morning.
"It was mishandled by the 9-1-1 operator," Balkwill said at a
press conference Thursday. "There should have been more questions
asked."
The reason, he said, was the way the operator interpreted the
call. "The initial 9-1-1 operator interpreted this information as
reported by the citizen as a suspicious aircraft rather than an
aircraft in distress," Balkwill said. "The 9-1-1 operator directed
the citizen to call an 800 number to report this aircraft
incident."
Michael "Larry" Bradshaw and Miguel Hernandez were trapped in
the wreckage for almost 20 hours before they were finally
discovered. The Sarasota County Coroner says they died on impact,
but a lot of local pilots and others are rattled by the amount of
time it took to discover the wreckage. All the while, Cindy and
Sheldon Toepfer could have provided more information about the
downed aircraft -- if only someone had asked.
The Venice Sun-Gondolier reports Balkwill has made the following
recommendations after his investigation of the call:
- Automatically, the call taker will contact the
Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport tower and Tampa Radar
approach.
- Unless a crash is obvious, the 9-1-1 operator will
automatically contact the sheriff's aviation and an aviation
supervisor will call back the person making the complaint.
- There will be refresher training to all 9-1-1 call takers on
airplane incidents, to include same procedures for suspicious
planes and plane crashes.
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