Sublette County residents aren’t the only ones who make emergency calls to 911 these days. As it turns out, Mother Nature has been placing a few of her own.

“Sometimes, when there’s a big weather event, some of the older phone lines around the county are triggered to call 911 by mistake,” said Stephen Smith, communications supervisor and dispatcher for the Sublette County Sheriff’s Office (SCSO), who also serves as Pinedale mayor. “Or when the power fails, we get those calls as well.”

Rain seems to be the primary trigger, since any time the area gets a lot of precipitation, the SCSO starts receiving the calls.

“We get a lot of them, especially if there’s wind and rain involved,” said Sheriff Wayne “Bardy” Bardin. “A lot of times, we’ll do a call back to the resident, and they don’t even know what we’re talking about…they’ve been (talking) on the other line.”

“They’re surprised usually that a phone call’s been made,” echoed Smith.

Despite the recurring problem, the SCSO still has to take every call seriously.

“Protocol is we usually call two deputies to any hang-up or open-line 911 call,” said Smith. “If we get a 911 call and we don’t know why, deputies respond just to be on the safe side.

“We never assume anything. It’s the crying wolf thing.”

Not only does the SCSO receive 911 calls from residential numbers in wet weather, it also receives false alarms from security systems.

During the week of June 7, the SCSO received at least a dozen such calls.

“Between 911 alone and home alarms, we went to 12 to 15 (calls), just in this last week,” said Bardin. “The alarms go directly to our (dispatch) office, and the 911’s, most of them go to our office. But some have gone to Lincoln County and Teton.

“They’ll call us and let us know that a certain phone call came to them, but it wasn’t in their county.”

Business and government building alarms have also had a similar reaction to bad weather.

“There’s a lot of them that go in the businesses and government offices throughout Sublette County,” Bardy said. “It’s a landline problem, and it happens to everybody. It all just depends on where it’s going to pick and choose.”

Because of the manpower and the costs that must be devoted to each call, the SCSO has had to implement a policy to minimize the expense of systems that repeatedly malfunction.

“We respond to every one as a burglary in progress,” said Bardin. “But if it’s a problem with the system itself, we’ll give them three shots. On the fourth, we start charging.”

All eight of the SCSO dispatchers have received the weather-related calls, especially since they are tied into every emergency service in the county.

“We dispatch everything for the entire county — law enforcement, fire, EMS, search and rescue, emergency management, hazmat — we’ve got a very good group of dispatchers that do a great job,” said Smith. “And any automated alarm of any kind, be it burglar or fire, even down to utility alarms, we get it all.”

The fact that these phantom calls occur was a surprise to CenturyTel, the phone service provider for the area.

“I’ve never heard of this one,” said Kim Valiquette, CenturyTel’s Wyoming representative, upon hearing of the problem. “It’s a little bit odd.”

Valiquette made calls to other CenturyTel personnel, trying to find the cause.

“I talked to an engineer and he did say it’s possible,” she said. “Any time you have electronics and add moisture to it, you can have issues.”

Now that CenturyTel is aware that the problem exists, the company will be taking steps to fix it. And the company has already contacted the SCSO, hoping to find a solution.

“Any time there’s any kind of issue with our communications, we take it seriously,” said Valiquette. “And we want to remedy the situation if at all possible.

“Our engineers are going to be working with the sheriff’s office and also the switch manufacturer to determine exactly what is happening with this phenomenon.”

In the meantime, the stormy weather that’s blanketed Sublette County for the past few months is finally lifting, which should ease the frequency of these calls.

It’s good news for dispatch, though Smith was stoic on the issue.

Regardless of a call’s source, dispatch personnel take it and their job seriously.

As for the dispatchers true feelings on the occasional calls from Mother Nature…

“Just part of the job,” Smith concluded, suppressing a grin.

For the complete article see the 06-26-2009 issue.

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