YOUNGSTOWN — A captain at the Youngstown Police Department, newly appointed to oversee its 911 center, said Lansdowne Boulevard resident Earl Minotti has reason to be upset that the response time to put out the fire that badly damaged his home early Thursday was delayed by a minute or more.

“The homeowner is legitimately upset, and they have a right to be, quite frankly. I want to get on this and figure out why this happened and how we can fix it,” Capt. Kevin Mercer said Friday.

A 4 a.m. fire on the third floor of Minotti’s home at 2008 Lansdowne Boulevard destroyed the third floor, where Minotti kept collectibles and many of his other belongings, and caused water and smoke damage to the rest of the house.

Minotti tried to put out the fire with a fire extinguisher and hose while his buddy called 911. Both men made it out safely, but Minotti said later Thursday, “I lost everything.” He is on disability and does not have homeowner’s insurance.

No report on the amount of damage or the cause of the fire was available Thursday or Friday from the Youngstown Fire Department.

The cellphone call from Minotti’s buddy went to the Trumbull County 911 center in Howland instead of the Youngstown 911 center. Minotti’s house is about a quarter of a mile from the Trumbull County line.

According to a recording of the six-minute call, the Trumbull County dispatcher spoke with Minotti’s buddy for about 80 seconds before dialing the Youngstown 911 center. The dispatcher and Minotti’s buddy then told the Youngstown dispatcher about the fire.

About three minutes after the start of the 911 call, Minotti took the cellphone from his buddy and asked the 911 operator, “Where you all at? The (Youngstown) fire department is up on McGuffey, not that far away. They’re less than a mile from my house.”

At the 4:18 point in the call, the Youngstown dispatcher alerted Minotti to the delay in Youngstown getting the call and assured Minotti Youngstown firefighters were on their way.

Minotti said he could hear first-responder sirens at the 5:24 point in the call. The sirens could be heard outside Minotti’s house about the 6-minute mark in the call.

AN OLD ISSUE

Mercer said he oversaw operations at the Youngstown 911 center years ago but then took on additional responsibilities for the police department. The issue of Youngstown calls going to 911 centers other than Youngstown’s was a problem in earlier years, but it apparently is happening again.

“It seems like it never went away or we thought we had it fixed and apparently we have not,” Mercer said.

“It’s odd how some of these cell towers are,” Mercer said. “Let’s say you’re driving in Youngstown and you call 911, and because you’re on a border of two cell towers brushing up (against each other), it ends up transferring you over to Trumbull County when you think it’s going to Mahoning County.”

“Those things happen. They don’t happen all the time, but they can happen,” he said.

He plans to get in touch with Maggie McGee, director of Mahoning County 911 and state 911 coordinator, and discuss what technical issues may be involved in the issue.

“This is a huge pet peeve of mine, so I’m certainly going to get on it. Of all the things we do in emergency services, whether it’s fire, medical or law enforcement, a call to 911 — I always tell people seconds matter and seconds save lives.

“So this was a delay of — I don’t know exactly — a minute, minute and a half. I’m going to pull the tapes, but that’s a long, long time. I don’t like a one- or two-second delay, let alone this length of time,” Mercer said.

In addition to the technological issues, he wants to talk to officials at Trumbull County 911 and possibly the other adjacent 911 centers to Mahoning County to make sure everyone is handling calls like this as effectively as possible.

He wonders why the errant call Thursday was not transferred to Youngstown much more quickly and has been told by a Youngstown dispatcher there have been times when information conveyed by the other center to Youngstown’s center was inadequate.

TECHNOLOGY

Mahoning County upgraded the technology in all of its 911 centers to tie all of them together “so all my people do is push a button from Youngstown to Boardman or Youngstown to the County (911 center) to Austintown or wherever it may be, and it’s an immediate transfer. We’re all in communication,” Mercer said.

Also, when Youngstown gets a call like the one on Lansdowne, dispatchers plug the address into a countywide GIS mapping system that tells the dispatcher from what jurisdiction the call is coming, and it “automatically populates what jurisdiction — Boardman, Youngstown, Austintown, Jackson Milton, you name it.”

Mercer said the Trumbull dispatcher may not have known the call was coming from Youngstown but said he doesn’t know what issues may have been involved.

“Why it got delayed that long to come to Youngstown I have no idea, whether they were confused as to whether it was Youngstown or not. I have to do some reasearch to figure out why,” Mercer said.

Calls Thursday and Friday to Rodger Laird, Trumbull 911 operations director, were not returned. But Patty Goldner, interim Trumbull 911 director, on Friday afternoon said Laird already has been in communication with Mahoning County 911 officials and should be able to discuss the Lansdowne call Monday.

She noted that when she plugged the first few letters of Minotti’s street address into the Trumbull 911 center’s computer-aided dispatch system, it did not recognize that address as being in Youngstown.

She said she did not know enough about the call yet to discuss the matter, but would research it Monday.

NEW DUTY

Last Monday, Mercer began his new assignment over the Youngstown 911 center. Unlike his assignment before that where he handled an assortment of issues, the 911 center will be his “sole focus” for a while, he said.

Among the issues he is addressing is the Youngstown 911 center being short staffed, including the resignation of a superviser.

He also will focus on issues related to the city’s primary ambulance company, AMR, “having enough paramedics to respond.”

“There are some projects I was working on in March. Then COVID hit and we had to table all of our meetings, and here we are a year later. But I was working on some more direct communication, maybe even putting in an AMR dispatcher in. There’s a lot of work on the table to further communications.”

He said the city’s ultimate goal — “It’s so far off I don’t know if I could ever accomplish it — would be to have one centralized 911 center where the entire Mahoning County works out of,” he said.

“We’re a ways away from doing that yet, but I am still working on enhancing that communication.”

erunyan@vindy.com