County communications cause frustration for San Bernardino Mountains residents

San Bernardino County has taken more than 3,500 calls on its winter storm hotline since last week.

By noon Sunday, March 5, the county’s hotline 909-387-3911 had taken 3,690 calls, according to county spokesman David Wert, at an average pace of 700 calls a day. The call line is now staffed by 23 people during the day and 10 people at night, with an average wait time of three minutes during the day and no waiting at night.

But it wasn’t always that way.

For days, mountain residents have complained of busy signals and dropped calls. And when they do get through, the results can sometimes be maddening.

“From day one, when we found out that this number existed, I called many, many times, sometimes many times a day,” said Katie Carson, who’s lived in Crestline for 37 years.

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She has a family member who needs life-saving medication that expires every few days. When she heard that county staff would deliver needed medications to those in danger, Carson gave the hotline another call.

“And the woman said ‘what do you think we are, DoorDash?’” Carson said. “She said something about ‘you should have prepared better,’ and that’s when I had to stop talking to her. Because we have been shoveling for days and days and days.”

A member of her church ended up delivering the needed medication.

In other cases, it was less clear whether residents were going to be getting help.

“They answered and responded very quickly and because we have a medical issue, they were going to push up our call to a supervisor, and they would return a call back to us,” said Crestline resident Susan Schafer. “They never returned the call. They never gave us a call back.”

She called back again and the people at the other end of the hotline were apologetic. But Schafer said she still didn’t get a call back.

“This is all over the mountain. People have been trying to get their medication, because the pharmacies have been closed,” Shafer said. “Once they take your information, you’d hope that they’d call you back.”

These sorts of calls to the hotline aren’t unusual. According to Wert, the most common calls are about running out of food, people needing medication delivered, structural problems caused by heavy snow, questions about road plowing and complaints about the county’s online snow plowing map.

The hotline is manned 24 hours a day, according to Third District Supervisor Dawn Rowe, who represents most of the mountain communities affected by the storm.

“One of the biggest challenges that I see with our current set-up is that folks just don’t have the confidence of knowing that they’re in the queue and that their concerns have been registered and are being triaged based on the need,” Rowe said Monday. “The absence of knowing that is causing anxiety.”

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Rowe, who also leads the county Board of Supervisors, said there will be an after-action report once the storm is done, to evaluate the county’s response and put in systems to better prepare for future extreme weather in the mountains. She would like to see a future system automatically let callers know where their request is in the process.

But before that happens, the county did make improvements to the hotline on Sunday, according to Wert. Where once the call center only relayed messages from callers to other departments, now members of various county departments are in the call center as well, to get callers the help they need immediately.

Mountain residents are still skeptical.

“They’ve obviously been inundated with our calls. I get that,” Carson said. “But so far, I haven’t heard of one person who’s called that number and gotten help. Not one.”

For more information on the storm, visit snowinfo.sbcounty.gov. Those needing information or county assistance should call the 24-hour hotline at 909-387-3911. Those with urgent medical issues should call 911.