Kyon Salaam and his mother were pulled to the street corner in their north Long Beach neighborhood by a violent crash. Two cars had slammed together in rush hour traffic. Assessing the scene, Salaam instinctively punched 911 into his cellphone -- and got a recording.
He hung up and dialed again. Stuck listening to the same message, he waited, concerned about a middle-age woman in one car who appeared hurt.
"She was scared . . . she couldn't turn off her engine," recalled Salaam, 25, a care worker at a home for the disabled.
His mother hurried back to her nearby condo, dialed 911 on a land-line phone and quickly got through to city dispatchers.
Salaam said he held on minute after minute, and finally gave up on his call after Long Beach police and fire units arrived and took the injured woman away. "It was crazy," he recalled recently. "It could have been a life-or-death situation."
Long Beach, the state's fifth biggest city, with roughly 492,000 residents, promotes itself as a major draw for conventions, tourism and night life. Recently, it has earned another, less-heralded distinction: It is the largest Southern California city not directly answering wireless 911 calls.
Instead, every month, several thousand cellular 911 calls like Salaam's are routed first to a California Highway Patrol communications center north of downtown Los Angeles. Calls that get through and involve Long Beach emergencies are then transferred back to the city's police dispatch center.
It's a detour that can be risky when seconds matter, and one that the vast majority of cities in the state have eliminated in recent years.
The CHP's Los Angeles call center is one of the busiest in the state. Recent improvements have reduced wait times, but on average this year they have been 46 seconds, when state guidelines call for at least 90% of 911 calls to be answered in 10 seconds or less. Some callers are stuck on hold for several minutes, records show.
By Salaam's estimate, he tried to get through for close to 30 minutes during the incident in June. Records of the call could not be traced, but the longest wait time logged in that period was about eight minutes, according to an official with the CHP's Los Angeles call center.
However, the official noted that when Salaam hung up, he would have gone to the back of the line of waiting calls.
