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Durham no longer routing 911 calls through Raleigh after weeks of delayed responses

For the past six months, when people in Durham have dialed 911, operators in Raleigh have taken almost 10% of the calls.

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By
Lora Lavigne
, WRAL Durham reporter
DURHAM, N.C. — 911 operations in the Bull City are returning to standard procedure after weeks of staffing shortages at the Durham call center required help from Raleigh.

Officials in Durham announced today that partnership is ending, while the center is still hiring.

For the past six months, when people in Durham have dialed 911, operators in Raleigh have taken almost 10% of the calls. Deputy city manager Bo Ferguson tells WRAL News that more staff members have come onboard and Durham employees are now prepared to handle 100% of the load moving forward.

“Our current vacancy level across the whole department is at 26 staff," Ferguson explained. "But, those are a variety of different positions. The positions that are most critical to these type of questions have been our call taking staff and those vacancies have dropped pretty significantly over the last year. “

WRAL has covered delayed response times and miscommunication to emergency responders for weeks as Durham 911 has worked to fill vacancies.

"Our staffing has fluctuated over the last number of years and I think what’s important right now is that we’ve returned to a level of staffing that we were at in the late summer, early fall of last year," Ferguson said.

Ferguson says his office is confident that the staffing issues are a thing of the past.

"We’ve looked at where our staffing was a year ago when we didn’t require any assistance from Raleigh. We’re back at those levels now," he said.

And there’s more staff in the pipeline coming online soon he says, but it could take more than three months until some are taking calls.

"The training process is a long one and that’s very intentional," Ferguson said. "This is really hard work and we need to make sure that people are exceedingly well prepared to answer 911 calls."

City Manager Wanda Page said in a recent report the city is recruiting four full-time certified training officers, hiring back retirees and former employees part-time, aiming to prevent this from happening again.

"We are recruiting new positions now and also we expect that this is going to allow us to add a new academy this year," Page said. "An extra academy that we have planned for. That means more trainees will be ready for call taking faster."

While it could take up to five months for new hires to become independent call takers, Ferguson says there is another group of trainees in the process now who will be ready this month and July. Residents and EMS could begin to see improvements as early as this week.

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