[Scan-DC] Loudoun County, Va., changes 911 procedures after delayed response to drowning

[KENNETH FOWLER]

By
Dan Morse

September 2, 2020 at 7:34 p.m. EDT
A Northern Virginia county announced significant changes to its 911 operations this week following the mishandled 36-minute emergency response to a drowning teenager over the summer in a creek near the Potomac River.
“When someone calls 911, I want them to get help as fast as possible,” Loudoun County Fire Chief Keith Johnson said Wednesday, discussing the training and procedural changes he is making at his 911 center. “We’re willing to do whatever it takes to make things better.”
Even as Loudoun rolls out the changes, though, the neighboring Maryland jurisdiction that initially handled the response — and did so without notifying Loudoun — remained silent on what changes, if any, it would independently make regarding training, staffing or how the 911 center can accurately identify the location of emergencies. A briefing is expected later this month.
As a teen drowned, 911 sent help to the wrong place
“Montgomery County owns this tragedy, too, and made mistakes,” said Hans Riemer, a member of Montgomery’s legislative body, the County Council. “We need to provide our own action plan to ensure this doesn’t happen again.”
The fallout comes nearly three months after Fitz Thomas, 16, died after swimming with several friends in a Loudoun County creek about 100 yards from where the waterway opens into the Potomac River. Thomas went missing underwater, prompting a friend to call 911 from a bank in Virginia.
Her June 4 call pinged off a cellphone tower and was bounced across the Potomac into Montgomery County, where it was answered by the 911 center there.

“We’re like, all swimming in the river,” said the caller, 16-year-old Angela Stefkovich. “We had a friend swimming and he’s under the water.”
The Montgomery County 911 center locked into the word “river,” assuming the victim was in the wider Potomac. Despite Stef­kovich’s more detailed description of where the teens were — a shallow inlet in Virginia — Montgomery launched a protracted boat mission targeting the Potomac. When Montgomery’s 911 center finally did tell Loudoun about the drowning teen — nearly 17 minutes after Stefkovich’s call — it said it was handling the rescue and did not immediately ask for help.

Montgomery rescuers never made it to Virginia, as the one boat they launched broke down. Loudoun itself fumbled 911 calls about the drowning that its 911 center received. Loudoun eventually dispatched help, with the first ambulance arriving 36 minutes after Stefkovich made her call.
Phyllis Randall, chair of Loudoun’s legislative body, the Board of Supervisors, criticized the Loudoun 911 center’s handling of the call but praised fire department officials for their detailed examination of what happened and the changes they’re making. Randall also noted that in the opening half of the response, Loudoun wasn’t even told about the drowning.
“I am baffled by how poorly Montgomery County handled this,” said Randall, who is a friend of the Thomas family. “How do you wait 17 minutes and then keep waving Loudoun off and saying we’re taking this call. . . . They need to work on their 911 center and retrain their staff.”

New information obtained Wednesday indicates Montgomery County’s call center knew precisely where the first 911 caller was when she called about her drowning friend. A map generated in the center, using the data platform RapidSOS, showed Stefkovich standing in Virginia, next to a creek, 100 yards from the Potomac River.
Even so, Montgomery proceeded down its path of an open-river rescue without telling Loudoun rescuers about a creek easily accessible from roads. The map was provided by a Montgomery County government spokesman after a request by The Washington Post.
Randall’s counterpart in Montgomery County, Sidney Katz, president of the County Council, said Wednesday he was in the process of setting up a briefing to the council’s Public Safety Committee for later this month. Montgomery’s fire chief and representatives from the agency that runs the county’s call center — the Montgomery Police Department — are expected speak to the panel.

“Obviously we’re very concerned about it,” Katz said. “When we get all the facts associated with it, we will address those concerns.”
Three days after the drowning, Loudoun’s fire chief, Johnson, launched a “Significant Incident Review” that included input from Montgomery County’s 911 center. That culminated in a 77-page report presented to Loudoun’s governing board on Tuesday night.
The findings include four “recommendations and completed actions” jointly made by Loudoun and Montgomery counties. They largely address rescues in the Potomac River, which separates the two counties but has long been under the general jurisdiction of Maryland. Those changes, previously announced, call for both counties to respond to emergencies in the Potomac River.
But one of the central shortcomings in the Thomas case was that the 911 centers errantly concluded he was in that river and not a creek within Virginia’s border. Along those lines, the Significant Incident Review identified 13 “recommendations and completed actions” that Loudoun County is implementing for how it handles all 911 calls, independent of Potomac River issues.

Among them is a pledge to better listen to 911 callers. The report said training would be launched to help call-takers focus “on both effective and empathetic listening” in an effort to “obtain more accurate information from 9-1-1 callers.”
Other training recommendations included better use of technology, enhanced teaching of county geography and mandatory briefings at the start of each shift. Loudoun also said it would add three call-taker/dispatchers to its 911 center, develop a detailed communications manual and “empower communications personnel to send resources to a general area to investigate an incident, particularly in areas along jurisdictional borders when it is unclear exactly where a victim is located.”
The county also has added 240 “commonplace names” of Loudoun locations to its 911 center computers, including Confluence Park where the friends were swimming, which was searched by the 911 center that day but was not in the system. Montgomery County did not submit any recommendations specific to its county for the Significant Incident Review. The county did submit, along with Loudoun, the four joint recommendations that addressed Potomac River rescues. In a statement Wednesday, Montgomery Fire Chief Scott Goldstein said the county was heartbroken by Thomas’s death.
“The Potomac River and its tributaries present many challenges in regards to emergency response, however, our recent review has opened up additional dialogue that has resulted in meaningful change for all those jurisdictions that respond to various water related emergencies,” Goldstein said.
Montgomery Council member Gabe Albornoz called the case beyond tragic: “We owe it to Fitz and his family and his friends to look at every angle and completely assess what transpired.”
Montgomery Council member Tom Hucker, the third member of the public safety committee along with Albornoz and Katz, called Montgomery’s and Loudoun’s responses shocking.
“I certainly want to get our agencies’ answers on why this response happened the way it did,” he said.
Montgomery Council member Evan Glass said the county needs to ensure its technology is up to date given how cellphone calls can bounce across boundaries.
“For the safety of every resident, we need to investigate this situation and ensure it doesn’t happen again,” he said.
Montgomery Council members Nancy Navarro, Will Jawando, Andrew Friedson, and Craig Rice declined to comment.