BY JAY BODAS
Staff Writer
WOODBRIDGE – Two full-time fire department dispatchers who fell asleep at their computer terminals while on duty have resigned.
The dispatchers, Stephen Weber, of Port Reading, and Charles Westcott, of Sayreville, failed to respond to a May 19 emergency call to 911. When a Woodbridge police officer went to see why there was no response, he found the two sleeping in their chairs in front of the monitors, said District 7 Fire Commissioner Dennis Henry.
“With two people here, something like this should never happen,” Henry said. “Given the potential, where minutes count, it was something that needed to be dealt with swiftly. They couldn’t work here any more, as that was unacceptable.”
Weber had been a fire district dispatcher for four years, and Westcott had put in two years.
The Board of Fire Commissioners gave the men the option of either being formally charged or resigning, and they opted to resign, Henry said.
Police dispatchers are the first individuals who answer a 911 call in the township. For first aid and fire-related emergencies, they then relay call information via computer to fire district dispatchers.
The two dismissed dispatchers were responsible for all of the township’s ambulance and fire-related calls during their shift, Henry said.
“The police dispatchers are the call-takers, and they will send it over by computer to fire dispatch, who will then dispatch first aid or fire services,” he said. “The communications are within a second, and it frees up the police department to handle their police calls.”
But things did not go according to the script during the early morning hours of May 19.
A 911 call came in from an elderly woman who was unable to awaken her adult son.
“On May 19 at 3:47 a.m., there was a call for first aid in Fords, and our dispatchers followed the procedure, put the information into the computer, and sent it to station 7,” said Woodbridge police Lt. Thomas Gennarelli. “Our procedure is after they send the information, to call there and make sure they received it. The police dispatchers sent it over and made the call. But they got no answer, and they had to call out of the district.”
Perth Amboy EMS was sent to answer the 911 call, Gennarelli said.
Ambulance members arrived to find a deceased man who had likely died at some point during the night, Henry said.
“He already had rigor mortis when the police got there,” Henry said. “We couldn’t save this person. But if it was someone where minutes counted, it was unacceptable that the dispatchers fell asleep like that.”
Within minutes of the original call, Woodbridge police were also dispatched to Fire Department District No. 7 to find out why there had been no response from the fire district dispatchers.
“When our officers got there, they found the dispatchers asleep, and at that point it became an internal problem for the fire district,” Gennarelli said. “They were notified and did an internal investigation, and it appears that the result of that investigation was that the two dispatchers that were working that night resigned.”
Henry said that the two dispatchers resigned the day after the incident.
“We used the report from the police officer as our proof for our investigation, and that was the information we used when we confronted the two employees,” Henry said. “When we confronted them, they didn’t deny it.”
The township’s fire district has a staff of approximately 22 dispatchers.
“We have six of them who work full time, Monday through Friday, 24 hours a day,” Henry said. “We also have 15 to 16 part-timers who work the weekends who fill in for the full-timers. The two dismissed dispatchers were full-timers. It is embarrassing to the dispatchers that this happened, as the majority of them are good. But the fact is that these two fell asleep.”
Henry, who has been commissioner for the last nine years, said that “nothing like this” has ever happened before.
“As soon as we found out what happened, we let them know that they were no longer going to be working here,” he said. “No matter what their reasoning would have been, it was unacceptable. It is something we can’t stand for. It is emergency service, and if someone needs us, minutes count. I really don’t care why they were asleep. If they did not get enough rest, shame on them.”
Weber and Westcott are both free to apply for other fire department positions, since no criminal charges were filed against them, and they were not formally charged with any violations by the fire department, Henry said.