Injured Officer Waits Two Hours For Troopers To Respond
This is kind of disturbing in that you would think an officer being injured would get quick response....I always assumed an injured officer would be top priority.....but it took FHP 2 hours to get to this trooper.....did they got lost? Wrong location?? Stuck in traffic??? yep all 3 happened.......no think what would happen if someone broke into your home and you called 911.....lower priority in my mind than injured officer....and to think how you would feel waiting this long for help....scary.
Injured Officer Waits Two Hours For Troopers To Respond
POSTED: 3:39 p.m. EST December 8, 2003
UPDATED: 3:46 p.m. EST December 8, 2003
ORANGE COUNTY, Fla. -- The Florida Highway Patrol is looking into what took troopers nearly two hours to respond to an officer in trouble. Orlando Police Officer Stephen Goree was involved in an accident on Orange Blossom Trail near the Seminole-Orange County border.
FHP gets hundreds of emergency calls a day. And, in this business, each call can be a matter of life or death.
"What we try to do is dispatch a trooper as close to the wreck as possible, because that decreases response time," says Kim Miller, FHP.
Monday, response time to this accident involving an off-duty Orlando Police officer and a tractor-trailer was anything but quick. It took troopers two hours to get to the crash site and re-open the road. Thousands of restless commuters were forced to wait in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
"We did get a wrong location. We don't know if we got it from OPD or fire rescue. We're still looking into that," says Miller.
She says her troopers were sent to a location in Zellwood, about 15 miles north of the accident. She says it took troopers longer than usual to get there because they, too, were stuck in traffic.
"We'll try to get around that stopped traffic so that we can keep moving, but we don't run code, as we call it, the blue lights and sirens, to a crash because of the fact that we do not want to cause another crash," says Miller.
The accident happened during the midnight shift. Only five to seven troopers are available, compared to about 15 troopers who work the day shift. Miller says it doesn't help that the department is down 15 vacancies.
"We're gonna be re-evaluating what occurred," explains Miller. "We've got our dispatchers looking into what they did. We're gonna be looking at the calls we received, the locations we received and how we can better improve on this, 'cause if we didn't do what we needed to do, we're gonna fix it."
Officer Goree dislocated his ankle. He's expected to be fine.
You would think that surely there were smaller communities, Sheriff's Deputies, etc. near by that could'ver responded also.
It also sounds like there was obvious miscommunication between the responding patrols and dispatch or dispatch receiving or giving out bad info for them to get lost, etc.
That will, unfortunately, happen from time to time. Too bad it had to happen with a injury incident though. What is interesting is why the two hours? Wasn't anyone relaying info from the crash site and the Troopers throughout the situation or did someone just go there merry way after passing on bad info?
And why didn't OPD follow up by sending some of their vehicles?
As a rule of thumb the shift Supervisor determines the extent of response, based on the type of situation is involved, until someone reports enough units are on site.
Between the FHP, OPD, fire and EMT response teams it sounds like too many thumbs in the plum pie might have contributed to the slow repsonse.
I hope everything turns out OK with him, regardless.
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Injured Officer Waits Two Hours For Troopers To Respond 
