The Pasco County 911 call center has had multiple problems in the past, such as a lack of personnel and, even worse, calls going unanswered.
On Wednesday, officials announced that the 911 call center will be adding eight new positions. Instead of 14 people at minimum, there will be 21 people on staff answering calls.
However, some are skeptical as to whether this will work.
Two weeks ago Jonathan Raiskin had an emergency that went unanswered.
“This is her sister, pulling up with her sister in the car who has already flat lined,” Raiskin said, describing the surveillance video that captured the incident.
The video shows two of his neighbors stopping at his home, one of whom is unconscious.
“The first thing I do is I open the door and I put my hand on her chest to see if her heart is beating, and she’s blue and ice cold,” said Raiskin.
One of the girls is on the phone with her father, who called 911. While they are waiting, they drag the other girl out of the car and begin to give her CPR. This goes on for a few minutes.
Finally Raiskin calls 911 himself.
“I’m standing here waiting," he said, "It’s ringing, and it’s ringing, and it’s ringing."
Frustrated after waiting, Raiskin hangs up. A few minutes later he gets a call back. Here is part of the transcribed recording.
“I just got a hang up from this number, do you have an emergency?” says the operator.
“Let me ask you one simple question," Raiskin said. "I called and 12 rings nobody [[expletive]] answered the phone, I have a person who is half dead here on the floor."
“Sir, it’s very busy,” replied the operator.
“He calls me back and says, 'We’re busy' ?" Raiskin said. "I mean, what kind of reaction do you think any citizen would have to that?”
The county says people should be getting calls answered within 10 seconds or at least a call back within a minute. However Raiskin says that wasn’t the case with him.
Eventually help did arrive from the earlier 911 call by the woman's father. The woman survived and she is doing okay today.
As part of Wednesday's announcement the county explained it went to full staff this year but it still wasn’t enough to handle the roughly 600,000 calls it gets a year.
"That's upwards of 1,900 calls a day and they don't come in on an average,” said assistant county administrator Randy TeBeest. “So if they did I could staff to the average, they don’t, they come in in waves.”
The county says within one year calls went up by 100,000 and people in the community have a bad taste in their mouth about how well operators answer calls.
“I worry a, the perception and b, the people that we might miss, and that’s a growing problem across the nation because of the number of cell phones and ways to contact 911,” said Tebeest.
The county says it actually does answer 98 percent. of the incoming calls. However the other 2 percent of callers, such as Raiskin, say they would like to see more.
Pasco County says it hopes the additional staff solves some of its problems but if it sees that more people are needed it will look into hiring more operators in the future.