PARIS – After fielding several calls in the past year from people upset with Oxford County Regional Communications Center dispatchers regarding 911 calls, Director Jim Miclon attributes their angst to misconceptions.

The main beef, he said Thursday morning in Paris, is that dispatchers are taking too long before sending out emergency responders. Not so, Miclon said.

“What they don’t realize is that we have three people working here, and after 3:30 p.m. four days a week, we added another person,” he said.

He identified the crew, which staffs the station 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as including one who solely handles 911 calls, another who deals with fire and emergency medical service responders, and a third who deals with law enforcement agencies.

Altogether, the Paris center dispatches for 50 agencies across the county.

“When we take a 911 call, a lot of people think we’re keeping people on the phone and not sending responders out. But, 9.5 times out of 10, an ambulance (or fire department or police) has already been dispatched. They may be on the phone for two minutes, but fire and ambulances have already been sent,” Miclon said.

Terri L. Littlehale, the center’s shift supervisor and emergency medical dispatch director, said that according to state law, dispatchers must gather all pertinent information within two minutes.

“The majority of calls are handled within a minute,” she said. “But if we get a serious call, we’ll get an ambulance going right away and still stay on the phone.”

Last year, the center was required and licensed to follow national Emergency Medical Dispatch protocol.

In addition to getting annual training in it, each dispatcher has an EMD book with 33 different cards keyed to emergency situations. Each card tells dispatchers what questions they must ask and gives additional information to either help someone until responders arrive or get more pertinent information for responders.

When someone calls the county’s 911 line, they hear a recorded message that asks for the address upfront.

“So when they hear a (dispatcher’s) voice, we already have their address,” and are asking what the problem is, Littlehale said.

Additionally, Miclon said some complainers have emergency scanners in their homes and get upset when they call 911 and don’t hear their complaint on the air. That, he attributed to the county’s five radio towers, frequencies of which not all public scanners pick up.

And, in June 2007, police in towns other than Fryeburg, Paris and Rumford, got the same computer-assisted dispatch software technology as the center and began accepting computer-sent calls rather than radio traffic.

“Not everything goes over the scanner anymore,” Miclon said.

Also, as of August 2007, the center got new 911 mapping software, which pinpoints an emergency caller’s location if their town’s addressing officer has completed mapping addresses. Rumford’s hasn’t yet, Miclon said.

“Sometimes we get three rescue calls right in a row and prioritize who gets toned out first…Once we get the initial information, it depends on where the person is calling from for the time (responders) get dispatched,” Littlehale said.