Arkansas fire chief's ex-number hot issue for new owner

Michael Blake of Little Rock knows he's ill-equipped to handle all the phone calls he's been getting.

Blake, 36, works for Arkansas Cleaning & Televising. He's not a firefighter, nor can he remember ever setting foot in McAlmont, an unincorporated Pulaski County community north of the Arkansas River.

Yet two to three times a week, for at least four and maybe five years, people have called Blake's cellphone trying to reach the McAlmont Fire Department, he said.

As of Saturday, Blake's phone number was posted in the "About" section of the volunteer agency's Facebook page. It's also listed in the online version of The Yellow Pages and on the website firedepartment.net.

Those three sources appear at or near the top of a Google search result when looking for the agency. (Search results can vary from person to person.)

McAlmont, a community of about 1,845, lies just east of North Little Rock and straddles the Union Pacific railroad. Interstate 40 makes up the area's southern border, and Trammel Road is at the northern end.

The calls Blake answers are often from insurance companies inquiring about previous fires, and sometimes from local businesses, like RNR Tire Express and Custom Wheels in Little Rock, he said.

A lot of people ask for "the chief," Blake added. He thinks all sorts of people phone him.

"Once they call my number once, I don't think they call me back."

Blake would later learn the reason for the calls: His cellphone number previously belonged to the former McAlmont Fire Department Chief, Ed Kinsey.

After Kinsey left the post, the online contact information was never updated. Blake got the phone number about five years ago, he said.

Blake said he tried tracking down the appropriate phone number from other central Arkansas fire departments and from 411. He got the correct number and wrote it down, once, but lost it.

Now, Blake said he interrupts callers to explain he's not who they're looking for.

"I feel like you're calling a police station or a fire station or a hospital, there's something either wrong or someone's really in need. And they're not getting the help they need," he said.

"It's kind of annoying," Blake said of the calls. "But if I could help them, it wouldn't be as annoying."

How has a volunteer fire department been able to respond to fires and other emergencies without a central phone number?

Volunteer and rural departments across Arkansas are dispatched through a central location in their counties, often the local sheriff's office or emergency management department, Gary Lawrence said.

Lawrence is the mayor of Huntington and president of the board of the Arkansas Rural & Volunteer Firefighters Association.

In Pulaski County, the sheriff's office mans that dispatch center at 2900 S. Woodrow St. They field 911 calls for the roughly 570 square miles of unincorporated county land.

Since McAlmont borders North Little Rock, some calls get routed to that city's 911 dispatch center, said Gary Gray, a deputy coordinator with North Little Rock Emergency Services.

That happens when a person in McAlmont is near the North Little Rock border and dials 911 from a cellphone. The call is routed to a cellphone tower within city limits, which sends the call to North Little Rock dispatch, he said.

Upon getting the call, the dispatcher is able to quickly transfer it to the Pulaski County dispatch, Gray said.

The Pulaski County dispatcher then contacts the appropriate agency.

Calls for assistance go out over a radio system, said Lt. Chris Ameling with the Pulaski County sheriff's office. Emergency responders also receive alerts on their cellphones, so there's some overlap, he said.

Volunteer fire departments like McAlmont's also have "mutual aid agreements" with agencies in surrounding cities, Ameling said. That means if a volunteer department requests help, that agency will respond. The details of those agreements are decided "before anything bad happens," he said.

The McAlmont fire agency has a mutual aid agreement with the North Little Rock Fire Department, North Little Rock Fire Marshall John Pflasterer said.

Pflasterer added that the North Little Rock agency gets "a lot" of calls from people trying to find contact information for the McAlmont agency.

"We don't really have a good contact for them, either," he said.

Funneling people toward the correct phone number online has also been an issue for the sheriff's office, and other law enforcement agencies, Ameling said.

The sheriff's office has one main phone number: (501) 340-6600.

That number is posted on the sheriff's office website and on its Facebook page.

But search engines aren't so easy to control.

Depending the search engine a citizen uses, different phone numbers pop up, Ameling said. Key words, like department versus office, can also alter the search results.

Ameling first noticed the problem when he worked out of a district office.

People who were trying to reach the central office kept calling Ameling about issues that weren't related to him or his geographic location. They would say his phone number surfaced first online.

Ameling and another lieutenant reached out to the tech companies to see what could be done.

They were told, Ameling said, that for an agency's designated phone number to show up in a search result every time, that agency has to pay a fee. That's not possible for a lot of county and city agencies, he said.

Ameling said he thinks the "computer big wigs" should take care of this issue, at least for public safety groups. This is because, when in crisis, a lot of people call the central phone number instead of 911, he said.

"There's people out there that still, to this day, don't understand that 911 is the number to call for an emergency," Ameling said.

He's gotten a call on a nonemergency line from someone who said, "I think I'm having a heart attack."

In his four to five years of answering calls, Blake said none of the callers seemed like they were in an emergency.

"I've never had a phone call where it sounded like they were in panic, or anything," Blake said.

"But some people are calm and some people are not, in those kind of matters."

When reached by phone Thursday, Bobby Moss, the current chief of the McAlmont Fire Department, said he was unaware the wrong phone number was posted on multiple websites.

Moss said he would take care of the problem. The agency, which has 14 volunteers on its roster, responded to about 475 calls last year, he said.

Because the vast majority of those calls came from 911 dispatch, Moss said he didn't think updating the phone information would increase the department's activity, much.

The correct number to reach the McAlmont Fire Department is (501) 563-1251.

It's Moss's phone number.

"The buck stops here," he said.

Metro on 03/06/2018

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