What the Dispatch Center Recorded

DRIGGS — Twenty-eight minutes after the 911 call came in, the chief of Teton County Fire & Rescue keyed his radio to ask the dispatch center where the fire was.

"I'm trying to respond from home with no active 911," Mike Maltaverne said at 8:59 p.m. on June 9. "I don't have an address for the fire, so all I have is two all calls that you've pushed. Can I get some directions or an address?"

The dispatcher relayed the address: 165 Olivia Court. The alert carrying the address reached his phone 95 seconds later, at 9:00:47. Thirty-three seconds after that, the fire was declared knocked down. The house was a total loss.

Engine 1 had been on scene since 8:46 p.m., 14 minutes and 55 seconds after the call came in. Dispatch told units to respond by voice about two minutes into the call, and the crew turned out on that, before the tone reached the station. Off-duty firefighters and command staff at home are paged separately. Those pages went out twice that night, carrying no incident information at all.

Why that happened is not a question either agency's records can answer. The Teton County Sheriff's Office, which runs the dispatch center, produced three sets of procedures that contradict one another, no shift schedule for the night, and no review of what happened afterward.

Teton County Fire & Rescue is a fire district, with its own board and its own line on the property tax bill. It does not run the center. "We are a customer of the Dispatch center and do not have the ability to deconflict these reports," Maltaverne wrote in the narrative accompanying the district's records release. "What you see is what we see."

The house stood on Olivia Court about six miles west of Driggs. Four people were displaced. The cause has not been determined and a fire investigator was assigned. Crews found the structure fully involved and fought it from outside. Nothing in the record suggests the notification delay changed that outcome.

The Sheriff's Office released 73 recordings from that evening: the 911 line, the fire and law channels, and the telephone calls between dispatch and responders. They run here in sequence, each preceded by its own timestamp. The radio and telephone exchanges quoted below are in there.

What responders got instead

Two pages reached the app before anything about the fire did. Both were all-calls, sending off-duty personnel to the Driggs fire station at 911 N. Highway 33 for backfill.

Backfilling the station is standard practice once a structure is lost and the operational worry shifts to the next call. Maltaverne has told county commissioners that about a quarter of the district's 1,200 annual incidents overlap another already in progress.

The first of them, timestamped 8:39:17 p.m., arrived with its details field empty. The app logged 30 responses to it. The second, at 8:54:19 p.m., carried a single line: "RESPOND TO STATION 1 FOR BACK FILL."

Neither said what they were backfilling for.

Off-duty firefighters began calling the Sheriff's Office non-emergency line to ask. "I'm off duty right now. We just got toned out for an all-call, so I wasn't able to get a hold of anybody," one told dispatch at 8:42 p.m., asking that the call notes be updated. He called again seven minutes later. "Zero notes in the active 911," he said.

At 8:51 p.m. Maltaverne came up on the radio. "I'm having a request for an all-call but no page for an incident, and we've got off-duty personnel trying to figure out what's going on," he said. Dispatch answered that they were working on it and had resent the page.

Seven minutes after that, still driving in from home, Maltaverne asked for the address.

The address nobody checked

Teton County's parcel records show Olivia Court, but no 165 on it.

The caller gave the address in her first sentence, and gave it three ways: "It's, it's 165 Olivia Court, 165 Olivia Court Circle, Hatfield Way." Three minutes later she repeated the middle one. "Yeah, I got that," the dispatcher answered.

"165 Olivia Ct" is what went into the system. It is what the fire district's incident report carries, what the paging alert carried when it arrived at 9:00:47, and what a commercial geocoder used to place the map pin that came with it. The same dispatch record lists the property's owner at a different number on the same street.

Verifying the location is one of the few things the national 911 standard requires outright. A location counts as verified, it says, only when the caller "has actively acknowledged or corrected" what is read back to them. The caller revised herself twice, and nothing was read back to her.

An address that is close still puts a responder on the right road. The two alerts that reached phones that night put them at the fire station.

When the fire district was told

The recording is the only record of the moment the fire district was told. The written ones disagree with it, and with each other.

The call went out by voice at 8:33:09 p.m., and the tone that alerts the station followed about eighteen seconds later. The dispatch system did not log "STATION 1 DISPATCHED" until 8:34:19, seventy seconds after the transmission went out and fifty-two after the tone. Eighty-six seconds after that entry, the console logged another: "STATION 1 DISPATCHED NO RESPONSE." Four seconds later, Engine 1 came up on the radio.

The dispatch report's call notes put Engine 1 responding at 8:35:56 and on scene at 8:46:18. Its unit table, in the same document, shows the engine dispatched at 8:45:27 and arriving five seconds later, with no en-route time at all. Station 1's dispatch is stamped 8:34:19 in the notes and 8:36:21 in the table. Maltaverne flagged it when he sent the records over: "You will find discrepancies between call notes and unit response times. This will need to be explained to you."

The obstacles field on the fire district's incident report reads: "Initial Radio Traffic about the fire, possibly to LE, was coming over St. 1 radios without tones from dispatch. Shortly after, tones were dropped while St. 1 fire units were donning structure turnouts."

Asked to check whether anything about the fire crossed the law channel before the fire dispatch went out, the Sheriff's Office reviewed the traffic and found only traffic stops, nothing related to the fire. The first transmission on the recordings is the fire dispatch itself, sent at 8:33:09 p.m. on both fire channels: "911, units, could you be en route to 165 Olivia Court for a possible fire, house fire? Paging out fire now." The tone that alerts the station had not sounded, and the dispatcher was saying so.

One unit is logged arriving on scene 27 seconds before it went en route. The report warns eight times that its own times are approximate, twice in the words "all times for units are approximate and do not accurately reflect response times."

The paging app, the record responders see, ran twenty-six minutes behind the dispatch entry. It did not carry the fire until 9:00:47.

An entry logged at 8:35:56 was edited eight seconds later; another at 8:46:18 was edited 14 seconds later. A dispatch log is a working document, corrected as an incident runs, and that is ordinary. It also means the version anyone reads afterward is not the version that existed at the time.

One entry the recording contradicts

At 8:37 p.m. the dispatcher asked the caller whether any vehicles needed to be moved out of the way. She said no. Six seconds later he asked whether anything close to the house could catch fire, and she answered: "The garage could catch on fire. Their cars could catch on fire."

At 8:38:02 p.m., the console logged: "NO VEHICLES CLOSE BY THAT COULD CATCH ON FIRE."

The fire district's report records that the garage was treated as an exposure and that "a single passenger vehicle was exposed on the Delta side of the home and was damaged by the structure fire." The report lists a second incident type: vehicle fire.

Thirteen days before this fire, Maltaverne told county commissioners that his complaint about the dispatch center was "incomplete dispatch information coming to our responders," and that there was no quality process to close the loop when the district flagged a problem. Both halves of that describe June 9.

Three rulebooks

Asked for the policies and procedures in effect that night, the Sheriff's Office produced three documents.

The newest, "EMS and Fire Procedures," is dated March 19, 2025. The second is titled "Teton County Sheriff's Office - Dispatch Center Training Manual," last updated June 8, 2019. The third is an undated quick-reference card listing seven questions to ask on a fire call.

The 2025 document says to "always dispatch an Ambulance to a structure fire." The 2019 manual says to send medical help if anyone is injured. On timing, the 2025 document lists dispatching the station "as soon as possible" as its own step; the 2019 manual says to do that "once all of the necessary information has been gathered," meaning the interview comes first.

Eleven seconds into the call, the caller said the house was on fire. Twenty-three seconds after that, the dispatcher asked whether she needed "an ambulance or police." At a minute and 18 seconds, he told her: "Okay, let us call out the fire station."

Of the seven questions on the quick-reference card, four were not asked at all: what type of fire it was, how big, what color the smoke was, and whether anyone was hurt. The 2025 document's one explicit safety instruction, that the dispatcher "should advise everyone to evacuate the building/vehicle and go to a safe place," was not given. The caller announced that she was walking back toward the door to close it, reasoning aloud that opening it had fed the fire.

The Sheriff's Office has not said which document governed. It did not respond to written questions sent August 11.

What standard applies

No standard with force in Idaho sets a time for any of this.

The national benchmark for dispatch timing, NFPA 1225, treats a fire involving a structure as a highest-priority event and calls for processing within 60 seconds. That target is an aggregate, 60 seconds 90 percent of the time, so no single call establishes compliance or failure. Idaho has not adopted it. The state commission that oversees emergency communications can recommend operating standards, not require them.

Neither NFPA nor the national 911 standard says anything about what a page has to contain. Both require that an alarm be transmitted and be preceded by an alerting tone. Neither specifies that it carry an address.

Idaho regulates who may work a dispatch console. It certifies emergency dispatchers through its Peace Officer Standards and Training Council. It does not regulate how a fire dispatch is transmitted.

Maltaverne says the district has asked the dispatch center to adopt a national standard for fire and EMS dispatching and has not succeeded. He describes the procedures it produced as reading "more like a 'training' document than official procedures." One of them is titled a training manual.

No one looked

The records request asked for any after-action review, incident review, debrief, or correspondence between the two agencies about how June 9 was handled. The Sheriff's Office recorded none.

"There is no current practice with Dispatch to close the feedback loop with the Fire Department in regard to issues with Dispatching," Maltaverne wrote. The district has begun emailing the dispatch supervisor with the date, time, address and explanation of each problem. "These emails do not get a reply." For Olivia Court, he wrote, there is no correspondence at all.

Nothing required one. The national 911 standard's quality-assurance provisions are recommendations, and they describe auditing a random sample of calls. No provision in either standard requires that a specific failed incident ever be reviewed.

Asked for the dispatch shift schedule for that night, the Sheriff's Office produced an email exchange instead. Its records officer had put the question to the communications supervisor, who had no copy of one dispatcher's time card for the pay period, put that shift at "probably 7pm-7am," and wrote of the second, "i dont know."

Two people were on duty. In May the county described a dispatch center with six staff: one manager, one dispatcher newly released from training, and four still in training. One budgeted position was unfilled, and part-time help came from four neighboring counties.

What to watch: The county's public safety task force, which Maltaverne first asked for in May as the body that would rebuild the dispatch services agreement, has not met. It was scheduled for June 2, then pushed to early August. It meets Thursday, August 13 at 4 p.m.

The 911 Tape Contradicts the Dispatch Record