Human error on the part of the Oakland County Sheriff’s dispatch center caused a 44-second delay in alerting the Oxford Fire Department to a June 23 house fire on 77 S. Glaspie St. in the village.

When asked if this delay hindered his department in this case or affected the outcome – the house was declared a total loss and condemned by the village – Fire Chief Pete Scholz instantly replied, “Absolutely not.”

A county radio operator mistakenly pushed the button to dispatch (or tone out) Orion’s fire department to the scene instead of Oxford personnel, according to Mel Maier, the sheriff’s chief of communications.

However, just after pressing the button, the operator quickly realized his mistake, got on the radio to tell Orion to disregard the call, then pressed the button to dispatch Oxford firefighters, he explained.

The total time elapsed between the Orion button push and the Oxford button push “was no more than 44 seconds,” according to Maier.

“In this case, (he) did hit the wrong button, but it was quickly recovered, quickly retoned,” he said.

Maier provided this reporter with a timeline.

County dispatch received the call at 1:21:25 a.m. The fire was reported by the home’s upstairs tenant.

Orion was dispatched at 1:23:48 a.m., then Oxford was toned out at 1:24:32 a.m.

Scholz arrived on scene at 1:32:20 a.m. followed by the first fire engine 33 seconds later.

The dispatcher did not attempt to deny his mistake or make excuses for it. “He told us he pushed the wrong button,” Maier said.

Maier explained the buttons which the radio operator presses to dispatch the Oxford and Orion fire departments “are right next to each other.”

“When you’re trying to get these (calls) out as quick as possible, I can see how (this type of mistake) happens,” he said. “We minimize (the chances of) it (occurring) the best we can. We try to color the buttons differently. They’re certainly labeled differently.”

But despite the county’s best efforts, the error still happened. “There is a human factor involved here,” Maier noted.

He was “concerned enough” about it to reach out to Scholz and discuss the situation with him.

When Maier asked Scholz if the 44-second delay hindered the department’s response time, made the fire worse or created more danger, the chief told him the same thing he told this reporter, “Absolutely not.”

“He didn’t feel it appreciably made any difference at all on the call,” Maier said.

“(Scholz has) been a good partner and I know he’d be honest with me if it was a problem,” he continued. “I do trust him on that. I can’t believe he wouldn’t tell me if there was a problem.”

The county has been dispatching all fire and emergency medical calls in both the township and village since April 2014.

Scholz told this reporter the fire spread so rapidly from the inside of the wall to the attic of this balloon-frame house that “even 10 minutes (of delay) wouldn’t have made a difference” in the outcome.

Officials said the fire originated in the downstairs tenant’s kitchen when something cooking on the stove was left unattended.

By the time the fire was discovered by the home’s upstairs tenant, he said he could see “yellow flames dancing inside the kitchen.”

Both tenants were able to exit the home on their own and neither was injured.

Maier said the only benefit of the radio operator’s mistake was it alerted Orion to a fire that it was soon dispatched to in order to provide on-scene support.

The chief has been asked why it took his department about 8 minutes to arrive at the scene and he explained, “It was (a) normal response in the middle of the night.”

“Everybody was sleeping,” Scholz said. “You get up. Get your gear on. Get in the truck and go. Sometimes you move faster than you move other times.”

“I would like to be quicker than that, but that’s what it ended up being,” he noted.

According to Maier, the Oxford Fire Department’s average response time for both emergency and non-emergency calls combined from April 2014 to May 2015 was 8 minutes, 42 seconds.

From May 2015 to today, the average response time was 7 minutes, 24 seconds.

“The run times are consistent with other fire departments in the county,” Maier said.

New equipment and staffing changes at the county dispatch center have helped improve response times since May 2015, Maier noted.

“We’re actually doing everything quicker now,” he said. “We’re getting the calls out quicker.”