Fla. 9-1-1 Operator Orders Pizza While Ignoring Emergency Call

Jan. 15--When a young man passed out at a Fort Lauderdale optometrist office in September, an employee dialed 911 for help. But instead of answering, the call-taker at the 911 dispatch center was ordering pizza.

For 15 seconds, the phone rang at the dispatch center run by the Broward Sheriff's Office. The caller hung up and tried again. No answer. Another try, and still no one picked up. Someone else at the optometrist office tried calling 911 from a cell phone. It rang for one minute and 15 seconds.

No one ever answered. No one called the office back, either.

The only call-taker who was available at the time, Frances Francois, was on the phone with Poppy's Pizza for eight minutes, a Broward Sheriff's Office investigation found. Four more call-takers who were supposed to be on duty at 11 a.m. that morning weren't -- and offered "no plausible reasons for their tardiness," Broward County administration officials found. Eight were busy on other calls.

"I'm so sorry," Francois said on the recorded line to Poppy's Pizza, when she was momentarily distracted from her lengthy lunch order. "It's real busy."

As 911 call tones and visual alerts went off in the Sunrise dispatch center, Francois relayed a complex order of six pizza slices, a calzone, pasta fagioli -- including a conversation about how to pronounce it -- two tuna subs and a chicken philly, according to the recorded call.

No supervisor noticed.

Francois, who declined comment for this story, was given a written reprimand in December, sheriff's office records show.

The embarrassing mistake was one more in a litany of complaints since Broward County formed a countywide system in 2014 for dispatching 911 calls.

"Short of the entire system being down, to me there's no excuse for not answering 911," Fort Lauderdale City Manager Lee Feldman said.

The new dispatching system succeeded in its main goal, which was to handle most 911 calls without having to transfer them. Callers using landlines have no trouble reaching the correct dispatch center. But the overwhelming majority of Broward 911 callers use cell phones. Cell phone calls can be misdirected to the wrong dispatch center by the cell phone tower.

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