Nearly 30 percent of 911 calls on Central Coast are by mistake

Hundreds of thousands of 911 calls have already been placed to Central Coast dispatch centers this year.

In Monterey County, nearly 30 percent of them are pocket dials or hang-ups, according to the county’s Emergency Communications Center.

As it turns out, it’s a pretty serious problem for just about everyone. Those mistake calls distract dispatchers from dealing with real emergencies.

Leslie Oliver has been a dispatcher in Monterey County for 30 years. She hears hundreds of calls every day and spends hours typing up each incident.

“If you’re a call taker and you’re sitting here answering the phone all day, about a quarter of those phone calls are hang ups or accidental dials,” Oliver said.

From kids playing with their parents’ cellphones to pocket dials, they’ve seen it all here at the Monterey County Emergency Center.

“Since the first of the year, we’ve received about 150,000 911 emergency calls. Of those calls, about 40,000 of those are hang up calls or calls that are determined to be pocket calls,” said Bill Harry, director of the center.

The problem for dispatchers is that all of those accidental dials, have to be returned.

“That is taking up the time I could be free to answering someone else’s 911 line that really has an emergency,” Oliver said.

A couple of ways people can avoid dialing 911 include: make sure to lock the phone after they are done using it, and if someone is in a business or office, a lot of times they will have to dial 9 and then 1 to get an outside line. Just make sure you don’t hit 1 twice

But if someone does accidentally get the dispatch center, Oliver has a bit of helpful advice.

“We would prefer they stay on the line and just let us know that it’s an accident so that we know there’s no emergency, and we don’t have to take that extra step to call them back,” Oliver said.

Comparatively, Santa Cruz Regional 911, which covers both Santa Cruz and San Benito Counties, has received 122,574 911 calls as of Oct. 8. Of those calls, 12,163, or approximately 10 percent, are accidental or hang ups.