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911 faces crisis: Callers who speak no English
Even if a caller doesn't speak English, 911 operators are on deadline to find out what the problem is.

By BRIAN FEAGANS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 05/15/06

The distraught caller from Snellville didn't speak English, so Gwinnett 911 operator Michelle Harrington made an emergency call of her own.

Harrington clicked the "Language Center" link on her computer and, within a few seconds, had an interpreter on the line. In a flurry of Spanish the interpreter deciphered the problem: The caller's boyfriend had attacked her.

ambulance?" The caller answered "No" through the interpreter. "Tell her we'll get officers out there," Harrington said. "Thank you, Language Line."

Once rare, foreign-language calls are routine at the 911 center tucked into the back of Gwinnett Police headquarters in Lawrenceville. And with no bilingual operators on the 97-person staff, the center depends on AT&T's Language Line Services. The Monterey, Calif.-based service offers interpreters around the clock in 156 languages, from Acholi (Uganda and Sudan) to Yupik (Alaska, Russia).

Gwinnett operators use the interpretation service nearly 40 times a day on average, phone records indicate. About 93 percent of foreign-language calls were in Spanish during March, according to the Police Department's phone bill, followed by Mandarin, Korean and Vietnamese at about 2 percent each. A smattering of calls in 11 other languages — including Bengali, Amharic and Ukrainian — also came into the 911 center in March.

The calls are a sign of the times in Gwinnett, an emerging immigrant hub where one in 10 residents spoke English "not well" or "not at all" in 2004, according to the latest estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau.

"When I first came to work here, it was practically unheard of to get a foreign language call," said Angie Conley, a 23-year veteran of the Gwinnett 911 center. Now it's rare for an operator to complete a shift without getting one, said Conley, the center's communications manager.

The Police Department's Language Line bill — nearly all of which comes from the 911 center — was about $20,000 in March, the most recent data available. That was almost double what it was two years ago.

Conley said she'd prefer to have bilingual operators but hasn't had any luck recently at job fairs. With 23 open positions, Conley said she struggles to attract anyone, let alone qualified applicants who speak a second language.

The on-call interpreters add yet another dimension to a job that already appears to test the limits of multitasking. Operators equipped with headsets, two keyboards, two mice and two monitors field a steady stream of calls from a bank of cubicles bookmarked by two giant flat-screen TVs glowing with satellite weather maps. To break up the monotony, they rotate stations every two hours.

The 911 center's general rule is to have police, fire or ambulance dispatched within two minutes of a call. But with no bilingual staff, that often doesn't happen on a foreign-language call, Conley conceded.

"It's almost an impossibility because it's going to take you the vast majority of the time to get an interpreter on the line and figure out what the problem is," she said.

Gwinnett isn't alone. Emergency call centers around the South have struggled to find operators who speak Spanish as large numbers of Latin American immigrants have settled into the region. Atlanta's 911 center relies on Language Line, though a few of the 149 communications workers do speak Spanish, said Sylvia Abernathy, a spokeswoman for the Atlanta Police Department.

The language barriers can cause mix-ups on occasion. A Haitian man who spoke some English called the Gwinnett 911 center recently to report that an elderly woman and her granddaughter were locked out of the house.

Lost in the conversation, Conley said, was a critical detail: the two also were trapped on a second-story porch. It took a second call from someone who spoke English better to explain it was an emergency, not a routine call for a locksmith, she said.

Maria Garcia, director of the Hispanic Community Support outreach group in Duluth, said some immigrants, particularly those in the country illegally, are reluctant to call 911 at all. "I think people feel intimidated," said Garcia, whose group runs a day labor center. Often the first thought of injured workers is to call a friend to take them to the hospital, not an ambulance, she said.

Indeed, phone records indicate that Gwinnett residents who struggle with English call 911 at a lesser rate than those who speak the language well. Calls requiring the Language Line represented about 3 percent of the 38,883 calls in March, even though people with limited English represent at least 10 percent of the population.

To help in emergencies, county 911 operators have all memorized the Spanish version of: "Do you need police, firefighters or an ambulance?" But the most critical piece of information is the location of an emergency, especially in the cellphone era, said Carrie Bennett, a supervisor at the 911 center.

So non-English speakers would be wise to at least learn how to say their address, Bennett said.

A Language Line interpreter can take it from there. When an operator dials the service, a Spanish speaking person usually picks up because that's the most common language needed. Connecting to interpreters who speak other languages takes a little longer.

Gwinnett's 911 operators say they've never had a dialect the service couldn't handle, though they came close with a caller speaking ancient Bulgarian. "It was like 3 a.m. and they still found somebody who spoke a Russian dialect that was similar," said operator Toni Wyman, who fielded the call. "I couldn't believe it."

Harder to believe, Wyman said, are the dozens of foreign-language calls that come into the center daily.

In fact, as she spoke, operator Tammy Clay fielded a call from a Spanish-speaking woman who'd been involved in a hit-and-run on Pleasant Hill Road in Duluth.

"Ask her how she is," Clay instructed the interpreter. "Estás bien, Señora?" the interpreter asked.

The woman was OK, and Clay dispatched a police officer. "Thank you, Language Line," she said, concluding yet another two-language, three-person emergency call in Gwinnett.



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Following is a list of the calls and the total number of minutes for each language that required an AT&T Language Line interpreter at the Gwinnett County Police Department in March, the most recent data available. Nearly all of the calls went to the county 911 center.



LANGUAGE CALLS MINUTES

Spanish 1,130 7,347

Mandarin 25 422

Korean 27 254

Vietnamese 23 202

French 3 51

Russian 3 26

Arabic 3 12

Bengali 1 8

Amharic 1 7

Bosnian 1 4

Cantonese 1 4

Ukrainian 1 3