NewsChannel 5.com - Nashville, Tennessee - Slow Response To 911 Calls Made In City Parks

Slow Response To 911 Calls Made In City Parks

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - When you call 911, you expect help to arrive quickly.

But emergency crews admit it that may not happen if you're in a Metro park.

This has been a problem for years, but, so far, the problem has not been fixed.

A woman riding her bike on a greenway falls of her bicycle. Someone calls 911.

Medics are immediately dispatched, but it took almost an hour to get the 44-year-old woman to the hospital.

Part of the delay was due to confusion in finding her. The way the greenway system is marked added to the confusion, according to Duane Phillips, director the Emergency Communications Center.

"Yes, it does slow response time," he said.

"The more information that we have, the more information that the person has, that can get it to us, the faster we can get them help," he said.

That's why every Metro address is logged into their computer. So help has an exact location to find you.

"If you have an emergency into the park right now, the only address we have is one address for the entire park," Phillips said.

The 911 center does not have the authority to assign street addresses, that's a city function.

So essentially the 36 miles of greenway trails do not show up in the 911 system.

"That's the problem," he said.

And accidents do happen on the greenways.

"I tripped over my dog, and I think I broke my shoulder," said one woman in a 911 call.

"There's a skater, he was rollerblading and he just fell really bad. He hit his head and he's bleeding pretty bad," said another caller.

"I am at Shelby Bottoms Greenway, where I had a bike wreck, a girl is down she is going into shock," said another caller.

Getting into the parks can be confusing for emergency personnel. Street crossing signs are visible, but the access points for paramedics are not marked.

For months, Metro agencies have been working together to fix the problem. They've been gathering data, mapping out park trails and asking questions.

"How they can get on the trails?" said Shain Dennison, greenways director for Metro Parks and Recreation. "Where we can put markers and other things that we can do to help identify ways that they can get on the greenways to get to people in case people have an accident."

But the new and improved system won't be up and running until the spring.

There's been internal debate about where to place the mile markers along the greenway.

The Nashville Fire Department wanted them every tenth of a mile just like on the interstate.

But the parks system has decided to place them every quarter of a mile. It's a pretty significant difference of almost 800 feet or a little longer than two football fields.

"After we've done our research and thought about Nashville's situation, our decision among the group was try the quarter mile, see how that goes, and if we find if we need closer than that, we will pursue that," Dennison said.

Many cell phones have GPS tracking, but that may not be enough to tell dispatchers exactly where you are.

Again, if they don't have a mile marker, or an address to enter into their system, it's going to be tricky to get help to you quickly. It's hard to say how widespread a problem of accidents is along the trails. NewsChannel 5 requested 911 calls from the last six months and received about half a dozen calls. But the way the computer system is set up, it's really hard to know for sure.