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How Atlanta is digging out of its 911 delays
Atlanta’s 911 emergency call center is working to reduce hold times. None of those efforts helped one Buckhead family in crisis.
In September, Miracle Willis was on her route delivering UPS packages in Buckhead when she came across a horrifying scene. A young boy was lying on the ground, bleeding from his head, drifting in and out of consciousness.
Willis dialed 911, and an automated voice answered. The city was experiencing high call volume, the voice said, and instructed her to stay on the line.
“I was like, ‘Wait a minute, who did I call? Because this cannot be 911,’” Willis said.
She recalls hanging up, then dialing 911 again. The same message played.
Willis’ experience with 911 is not uncommon across metro Atlanta, an investigation by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found. Too often, callers are left waiting for someone to answer the emergency line. In the city of Atlanta, about 30% of emergency calls in 2023 took longer than the industry standard, which requires that nearly all calls be answered within 20 seconds. Atlanta hasn’t met that standard in four years.
With about a million calls each year, Atlanta E-911 handles the largest share of calls among the metro area’s network of agencies. In 2023, nearly 100,000 callers in the city were on hold for longer than a minute, according to records obtained by the AJC.
Atlanta officials recognize they have a problem. The city council receives regular updates from the police department on the city’s progress in addressing 911 delays, and so far, they’ve added staff and made upgrades to technology.
“We know we have to work on this, and we are,” said Peter Aman, chief administrative officer for the Atlanta Police Department.
None of that helped Steve and Melissa Nowak’s son.
The Nowaks rushed to the scene of the accident in Buckhead the moment they heard their son fell off his electric scooter. When they arrived, the couple saw their 13-year-old shaking and crying out in pain. Blood gushed from his ear.
Willis, the UPS driver, said when she finally reached someone a few minutes before that, they told her to call back if the boy threw up. Shortly after, the Nowaks’ son puked.
They called 911, and an operator picked up. The person on the other end of the line said they were aware of the situation but couldn’t tell the Nowaks when first responders would arrive. The operator didn’t stay on the line with them. In the meantime, they called a friend who works as an emergency room doctor. He rushed to the accident.
“We were reaching out for anybody,” Melissa Nowak said.
“Just anybody,” Steve Nowak echoed. “We were scratching for help, because there was no real help to be found.”
They said it ultimately took nearly 30 minutes from when the first call to 911 was placed for an ambulance to arrive.
Like many cities, Atlanta faced setbacks to its 911 answer times during the pandemic. The city went from meeting the industry standard in 2019 to answering fewer than 80% of calls within 20 seconds by 2021, police records show. The next year, that rate dropped to just over 70% of calls.
Desiree Arnold became Atlanta’s E-911 director in 2021 and inherited a department plagued by high turnover and low morale. Since then, Atlanta officials raised the starting salary for 911 operators by thousands of dollars — to about $43,000 annually — and approved additional bonuses.
They also hired 50 people last year, and 30 more had started the training process by the end of March.
Onboarding a 911 operator takes a long time — about six months — which means many of those hires in 2023 are just now starting to answer calls.
Last year, the city invested in technology that shares a caller’s location and allows dispatchers to text, receive photos and watch live videos from a scene. A system upgrade in late 2022 included a feature that automatically calls back if a person hangs up or gets disconnected, according to a spokesperson for the APD.
Atlanta officials have made physical improvements to the call center, which suffered water leaks and equipment outages that forced employees to evacuate and route calls to the Fulton County E-911 center back in 2021 and 2022. Since that time, the city rebuilt the center’s generator and replaced the air conditioning system, and the city is working to implement a backup power supply. Officials are considering building a new center to house Atlanta’s 911 operations.
Every time a major change is made, there’s a risk that the whole system could tumble.
“It’s like working on a plane while it’s flying,” Aman said.
There are signs the city’s efforts are working. For the year to date, about 80% of calls were answered within 20 seconds. For the first two weeks of March, that rate was up to 90%.
Credit: Miguel Martinez
A spokesperson for Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens deferred to APD officials for comment on this story.
This year, the city launched a public awareness campaign urging residents to use 311, the nonemergency number, for situations that don’t need an immediate response from authorities, such as car break-ins and minor fender benders.
The campaign has highlighted some of the more outrageous calls made to the emergency line, such as people calling to complain about traffic or asking for police to come kill a spider in their apartment.
Dustin Hillis, vice chair of the city council’s public safety committee, has been working on the issue of reducing wait times. He said a woman in his district called 911 because she was frustrated that someone messed up her peach milkshake.
“This call could be blocking someone who just cut their arm off and needs an ambulance,” he said.
The Nowaks’ son survived, but he is dealing with the aftermath: He missed months of school, is in physical therapy and experiences daily headaches.
The couple is also living with the trauma that, in their most vulnerable moment, 911 failed them.
“This cannot happen again. This cannot happen in Atlanta,” Steve Nowak said, adding: “We claim we’re a world-class city and we have third-world resources coming here. I mean, it just blows my mind.”