By Jim Phillips, The Athens News
Original publication date: Nov. 15

Athens, Ohio — An automated phone call that went out to more than 23,000 county residents early Friday morning, informing them of a possible fire at the Bob Evans restaurant in Athens, was the result of a simple mistake on the part of an inexperienced dispatcher.

“We have some new dispatchers working,” Melissa A. Fowler-Dixon, administrative assistant for the county’s 911 emergency phone system, explained Friday. “It was just human error.”

Fowler-Dixon said the agency is addressing the issue to help ensure it won’t happen again.

“We’re rendering the problem now,” she said.

The robo-calls went out at one minute after midnight Friday morning, according to the agency, as part of a county-wide “all-call” on the 911 “CodeRed” system.

Fowler-Dixon explained that the dispatcher who triggered the county-wide all-call believed she was pushing the button to send out an all-call to the county’s off-duty firefighters.

“(CodeRed) is not used on a daily basis, and she just got confused,” she said. The all-call was in response to a call about 15 minutes earlier of smoke coming from Bob Evans’ roof.

It turned out there was no fire — though a crowd of county residents reportedly showed up at the restaurant to see what was happening, based on the 911 calls.

Fowler-Dixon said the agency has had the CodeRed system in place for “a couple of years.” She said the calls went out to “every available phone line,” which would have included all the listed landlines in the county, plus any cell phones anyone has chosen to register with 911.

She noted that the 911 system has the ability to send out all-calls to residents limited to defined geographic areas for localized disasters. “We can lock it down to a one-block area,” she explained.

Under some circumstances, Fowler-Dixon said, the dispatcher’s mistake could have cost the county some money – about two cents per call, or about $460. However, she said, the 911 system is allowed some test calls, which are free.

“We can chalk this up to a test call,” she said.

She added that the erroneous all-call has a silver lining.

“A good thing that has come out of this is… a lot of people are calling to register their (cell) phones,” she said.

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