Large Fierce Mammal

Previously in this series —

• Communication — Lessons Not Learned

“There is a tendency, based on a far too wide spread conceit of far too many, to learn of something that was done a certain way in “the olden days”, realize the reason is unknown to them but make no attempt to research why, deciding instead to derive contentment from the conclusion that it’s because the people back in those days simply didn’t know any better.” ~ Everything Old is New Again

Welcome back Goode Reader to this second installment of our ever so educational, and I hope entertaining albeit darkly so, series on the subject of Communication as it applies to winning instead of losing, and living rather than dying.

Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. 1983-1985:

On 3 May 1983, after two years as a consultant in Halifax, I hung out the shingle for the business I still operate to this day. The following year (1984), I spooled up its 24/7 staffed facility to provide continuous alarm monitoring services for our own client systems, mostly fire alarm in those days. It was the year after that (1985) when we were approached by the Lunenburg & District Fire Department to service all of its emergency dispatch needs. That marked the first of 17 trailblazing years spanning those prior to and after introduction of the Nova Scotia 911 emergency reporting system in 1997, that saw “Central Dispatch” handling emergency traffic for five fire districts (Lunenburg, Mahone Bay, Chester, Chester Basin, and Hubbards) and the Lunenburg-Mahone Bay Police Service.

Nova Scotia fire services were then, and still are, mostly volunteer, covering a mix of small town, rural, and woodland districts. In 1985, each fire department had a unique seven digit emergency number that, with few exceptions, rang simultaneously on extension phones located in the homes of its members, local nursing homes, the hospital if the community had one, and even the funeral home. True “centralized dispatch” in the form of a dedicated 24/7 establishment where emergency calls were answered and dispatched by anything more than a simple “answering service” represented terra incognita for most rural and small town fire departments before Lunenburg & District Fire Department (LFD) officially joined Central Dispatch on the fateful date of 3 June 1985.

Dayspring, Nova Scotia. 3 June 1985:

Late on the night of 3 June 1985, the first night of providing dispatch service for the LFD, their emergency phone rang and was answered by me personally. At the other end of the line was a weeping woman I soon learned was erupting in relief at the sound of not just my voice, but any voice in her ear.

In the course of our brief conversation, I learned that the caller lived on the west side of the LaHave River, and was calling to report what appeared to be a forest fire burning and spreading rapidly on the east side of the river opposite her location. A check of the map on my wall confirmed that her description would put the fire in that portion of the small rural community of Dayspring that lay along Highway 3 where it ran immediately adjacent to the riverbank.

Dayspring has its own fire department, the number for which the woman had dialed multiple times only to be met with silence at the end of the line. The location being less than five minutes by road southeast of the Town of Bridgewater, not only the largest town in the county but with its own well equipped fire service, the caller next tried their emergency number with the same result. This was repeated with her own local fire department and several others before she called the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) about the matter where she actually spoke with someone, only to be given the advice that all brush and forest fires were the jurisdiction of the Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and that she should call their 1-800 number which was kindly provided.

Meanwhile, the fire kept burning, and the woman was wondering if their was actually a house in the middle of it that was so engulfed that all shape of structure could no longer be seen.

And so it was that before taking the advice of the RCMP, she called the fire department in the second biggest town, Lunenburg, and got me.

It hadn’t escaped my notice that with the exception of the RCMP and the LFD emergency line, every number the woman had dialed and heard nothing but silence from was in the Bridgewater 543 calling area, meaning that the seven digits dialed were in the format 543-NNNN (Lunenburg, my location, being 634-NNNN). Her own telephone number likewise bore the 543 prefix leading me to suspect that some sort of network malfunction may be permitting only outgoing calls from those numbers. Against the possibility that this was the case, I asked her to stay on the line with me until my units were on scene, and to immediately call me back if the connection was lost because I doubted I would be able to reciprocate from my end. As it later turned out, I was wrong about that, which we’ll get to in a moment.

Dispatching LFD units, my only location information was to go to Dayspring and stop when you find a large fire. Passing by the Dayspring & District Fire Department (DFD) station, 10 minutes by lights and siren from Lunenburg and less than a minute from the fire scene, the lead LFD truck reported startled looks from LFD members who by then were just boarding their trucks to roll. As it turned out, one of their members had spotted the fire as well and managed to muster a response by driving to the fire station and manually calling everybody on the active list, having no way of knowing that anyone else knew what was happening.

And so it came to pass that LFD arrived on scene mere minutes before DFD. In the course of ensuing hours and with the aid of additional fire departments called in to assist, the fire that consumed the house of Jack and Micheline Hulme and nearby woods was extinguished. In the rubble, still in their bed, the couple were found and first presumed to have been overcome by smoke until further examination revealed they had both been shot in the head.

With fire risk abated, and the site now declared a crime scene, the RCMP took over the investigation and it fell to me to render a report that might shed light on the communications failures that contributed to lengthening the burn time of what now appeared to be a fire lit to destroy evidence of murder.

Between the rumour mill and bush league media racing to proclaim any hint of “news” surrounding what was for many months the only thing anybody wanted to talk about, it should come as no surprise that the term “shot execution style” was on every unwashed lip, and theories abounded branding the soon well known albeit thoroughly misunderstood issue an admittedly convenient telecommunications failure that rendered every nearby fire response agency unreachable, a thing that only the dark hand of “organized crime” could explain.

The murder of Jack and Micheline Hulme has never been solved. Their teenage son who lived with them was briefly detained and questioned over what was initially regarded by police as his convenient absence from the house during the period of time in which the crime occurred, for the stated purpose of taking his dog for a midnight walk on a beach about a forty minute drive away. Admittedly not a good time of night for witnesses to corroborate your alibi, but in the end he was released sans charges. To this day, no arrests have been made, and as of April of 2014, a $150,000 reward is offered for information leading to arrest and conviction of the perpetrator(s).

One matter was resolved though, but whether anything resembling a lasting lesson in emergency communications architecture has been learned and institutionally internalized is open to debate. I speak of course to the conclusions of my own investigation into how and why I ended up being called on the incident in the first place.

In conducting my postmortem, these were the facts:

1. The original caller had been 100% unsuccessful in reaching any fire department she had dialed prior to dialing the RCMP dispatch number, and subsequently the LFD number.
2. 100% of her unsuccessful calls were to numbers conforming to the 543-XXXX format while those for the RCMP and LFD did not.
3. In my later interview of the original caller, she reported that at no time did she experience loss of dial tone on her own telephone line, nor interruptions in dialing all seven digits, and that for every failed call the experience was the same — dead silence.
4. The DFD member who physically drove to the station from which he called fellow members at home reported first attempting to dial the DFD emergency number with the same results as the original caller. The fact that he had no difficulty reaching any of the individual members, even though nearly all had telephone numbers in the 543 calling area, is of interest as it pointed to a network failure of very limited scope that was clearly not universal within that area.
5. At the time these events transpired, all calls made to or from any telephone line in the 543 calling area would have been routed through the Maritime Telegraph and Telephone (MT&T — now Bell Aliant) “central office” (CO) located on King Street in the Town of Bridgewater. 1985 telephone technology relied upon copper wires connected in pairs to automated switching points on “line cards”, each of which handled call switching for a number of 543-XXXX numbers. I no longer recall how many lines each line card controlled, but for illustration, let us say it was 20. In that case, failure of any individual line card would cause loss of function for every line connected through it up to the maximum number of 20 if that was the number it controlled. In addition, line cards were designed to distinguish between incoming and outgoing calls, and route them accordingly, so a partial line card failure could, in fact, cause loss of one or the other, while not both at once.

MT&T was extremely cooperative in my investigation, permitting me physical access to the King Street CO and a knowledgeable technician who worked there.

Findings and Corrections:

At some point in the history of the MT&T King Street CO, its management had decided to route all fire service telephone numbers in the 543 calling area through a common line card. These numbers existing exclusively for the purpose of receiving calls, not making them, loss of outcalling capability could have gone unnoticed in perpetuity. It was loss of incoming call features that led to the travails of 3 June 1985, and explains why non-emergency numbers were unaffected.

The timing of the failure was impossible to pin down as it required failed calls to affected 543 emergency numbers to disclose. In 1985, fire department emergency response was required far less frequently than now under 21st century protocols, so the best determination had to be based on the date and time of the last known successful call made through the affected line card. No evidence could be found that would tie the timing of the failure to the specific interval in which the Dayspring incident occurred beyond an unfortunate and inconvenient overlap.

MT&T responded with alacrity to the obvious recommendation that emergency telephone lines for all calling areas be spread out across multiple line cards, and that functionality be subject to regular scrutiny to limit the possibility of undetected failures. End users — the fire departments themselves — likewise needed to take responsibility for running their own regular checks to ensure that the populations they serviced enjoyed the best possible chance of success.

Conclusions:

If there is any light to be found in the telecommunications failure described above, it can be found in the grim truth that Jack and Micheline Hulme were already dead by the time the fire that consumed their home was lit. Fire service responders were undoubtedly placed at greater risk by the growth of the fire permitted by delays in reporting it, but this was not as bad as it could have been if minutes were the arbiters of life or death under circumstances where criminal intent was not a factor.

In short, it could have been worse. Lessons were learned. Fixes were made.

When we next gather, we’ll look at whether or not any of it stuck.