Bad Calls: How Do Error-Prone 911 Operators Keep Their Jobs?

Aug. 18, 2008— -- One 911 operator reportedly fell asleep so soundly at her desk in Atlanta that she fell off her chair and scraped her ear, later filing a worker's compensation claim, which was rejected.

Another allegedly told a caller in Watauga, Texas, who was worried about an out-of-control child, "OK, do you want us to come over and shoot her?"

A third operator allegedly hung up on a 19-year-old college student in Madison, Wis., who was desperately calling for police to come to her home, where an attacker eventually stabbed and bludgeoned her to death.

Those are just some of the alleged mishaps and often deadly mistakes made by 911 operators in recent years, raising questions about the training, supervision and workload of these crucial workers who operate on the frontlines in emergency situations and are expected to exercise the best judgment in split-second decisions.

The latest such mistake to make headlines involved Gina Conteh, a 12-year veteran 911 operator in Atlanta, who according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, had amassed a 2,100-page personnel file documenting such problems as falling asleep at her desk, getting into heated screaming matches with co-workers that earned her a trip to anger-management classes, and scores of reports of mishandled calls.

But none of those mishaps or the other problems reportedly documented in her file caused Conteh to lose her job, that is, until Aug. 2, 2008.

On that afternoon, authorities said Conteh gave the wrong address to ambulance drivers responding to a distress call from a woman, Darlene Dukes, who was feeling sick. While police and paramedics worked for more than half an hour on Dukes, desperately waiting for the ambulance to arrive, she eventually died of a blood clot in her lung and Conteh was fired.

Conteh did not return calls for comment, but she is reportedly appealing her firing , according to her lawyer, Rory Starkey.

Local officials were outraged that Conteh could keep her job for so long, blaming the city's civil service protections that require documentation of discipline problems and allow for numerous appeals.

"Essentially you can't be fired," Rob Simms, chief of staff to the former Fulton County commissioner, told the paper."There's no accountability. How do you manage or supervise in an environment where there's no accountability."

In the Madison, Wis., case in which an unnamed operator was accused of hanging up on soon-to-be-slain University of Wisconsin-Madison student Brittany Zimmermann, civil service rules protected the dispatcher, whose union insisted that the dispatcher made the right decision and followed 911 protocols in handling the call. Calls to Laurie Lane, the dispatcher's union chief steward, were not returned.