9-1-1 Lies
The 9-1-1 deception is spreading. We busted Acadian Ambulance again for providing false ambulance response times. This time it’s the town of Nederland, but we’re still following the aftermath of the 9-1-1 Lies and cover-up in Port Arthur.
“We move now to a developing story in Port Arthur.”
Gunfire rings out in the middle of the day at the Prince Hall Village Apartments in Port Arthur.
“The victim was taken to the hospital and according to the chief is in serious condition now.”
But the TV anchors in the Golden Triangle couldn’t know what we now know.
Someone at 9-1-1 literally forgot to dispatch the ambulance to the scene of that critically ill gunshot victim, and now there is an internal review to find out why.
Luckily in this case, we’ve learned a crew from the city’s private ambulance company, City Ambulance, they were listening to the fire radios and noticed that no one was being sent. They self-dispatched.
It does not appear to have affected the outcome of the patient, at least this time.
“We also just got word moments ago, murder charges have been filed against an off-duty security guard.”
42-year-old Bobby Francois succumbed to his wounds.
“He was shot in the back and the leg, lost a lot of blood.”
We’ve been keeping an eye on the news headlines from Port Arthur ever since we first went to town more than a year ago.
We proved the city’s longtime ambulance company Acadian was providing falsified response time data to the city.
Apparently no one at the fire department had even checked the math until Greg Benson came to town.
“Well I have to wonder if they didn’t get a little bit comfortable,” said Chief Benson. “If nobody’s asking about your performance level, do you have to worry about it?”
After the embarrassing revelations, Acadian Ambulance eventually pulled out of Port Arthur.
How was Chief Benson rewarded for actually giving a damn about the safety of his town? He was fired.
“Do you think this was retaliation?” Wayne Dolcefino said.
“Yes,” Benson said.
He was fired by a city manager who got away with simply lying about his plans to investigate it all.
“Can I call bull, mayor? It’s been months. Not a squat’s been done, not a squat’s been done,” Dolcefino said in May 2024.
Can you believe it’s already been a whole year since the chief was fired? And Benson? He’s still fighting to get his old job back.
The Port Arthur fire department has been in leadership limbo ever since.
“Instead of facing a likely lawsuit from Chief Benson, Port Arthur City Council should have reinstated him long ago.”
“The whole reason that you went after Chief Benson as the city is because you believed that he had involved…well-known investigative reporter Wayne Dolcefino,” said Attorney Larry Watts.
A panel of city employees have already rejected Benson’s appeal, but that’s not a shocker. The City Manager is part of the panel.
You may remember Port Arthur police did announce they were investigating the Acadian response time records. That’s after we filed a formal criminal complaint.
“That so called investigation? It was a joke. No one from Acadian was apparently even questioned.”
After months of virtually no police work, the police chief in Port Arthur gave Havens the options of closing the investigation down. And Havens? He said yes.
Interesting because he had been one of the longtime Port Arthur fire department officials that Chief Benson suspected was a little too close to the folks at Acadian.
They had held the ambulance contract in Port Arthur for 13 years.
“You always suspected Havens was one of the people who was too close to acadian,” Dolcefino said.
“Oh yes,” Benson said.
The Jefferson County district attorney refused to do anything either. Keith Giblin wouldn’t even return our phone calls. Voters should remember that.
Many cities have fought our continuing investigation into Acadian, a Louisiana company with business in a bunch of Texas counties.
Miles from Port Arthur is the town of Nederland. And the natives here, like in a lot of places we visit, are restless.
“Let me finish, please. No let me finish please.”
That fight was about drainage, but you know what else is on the ballot in May? The quality of the ambulance service Acadian is providing in Nederland.
“This is a top priority. We have to have readily available ambulances to respond to our citizens,” said City Council candidate Britton Jones.
Britton Jones is running for city council in Nederland… part of a slate with council candidate Jeff Ortiz and Jeff Darby, who’s running for mayor.
And they have their sights set on Acadian.
“Are you guys, if elected, going to do a full review of this?” Dolcefino asked.
“Absolutely. A full 100 percent review of everything.”
Like Port Arthur, Acadian does not provide a dedicated ambulance. But it has held the 9-1-1 contract there for more than a decade.
“The private ambulance company does seem to have lock on this area,” Jones said.
And like Port Arthur, it appears no one has been actually checking to see if Acadian’s response time records are even true, whether they are providing the response times the ordinance requires they provide.
The Nederland ordinance requires Acadian to respond to 95 percent of priority one calls in less than eight minutes.
“It’s there, it was put there for a reason, and it needs to be followed,” Jones said.
“I bet you know where this is heading.”
Under state law, we obtained the Acadian response time records.
And in just three years there were more than 2,000 times that Acadian Ambulance didn’t even have an ambulance to immediately send when someone in Nederland called for help.
It’s called level zero on the documents.
In one case, it resulted in the ambulance arriving in almost an hour; 58 minutes.
We found ambulance response times as long as one hour, 24 minutes in the data.
It’s true that Nederland firefighters respond to every 9-1-1 call and they can treat a victim on scene.
But then they have no way to transport until an Acadian ambulance shows up.
Britton Jones went farther back than we did in his own records search.
“I was absolutely shocked when I saw the 2,786 level zeros over a five-year period,” Jones said.
Once again, we saw response time data from Acadian that simply can’t be true.
Response times as quick as two seconds to a 9-1-1 scene, a lot of clearly false data in here.
“Unless you’re going from one side of the street to the other on all these calls, it’s just not feasible,” Jones said.
“Every town that has Acadian Ambulance should be looking at their response time records because a pattern is emerging.”
In Nederland, the fire chief doesn’t even know from the records what calls were important, and which were routine.
“That means they can’t possibly know if they are getting cheated or not,” Dolcefino said.
“That is correct,” Jones said.
The city ordinance says the Acadian contract may be terminated, “if the EMS provider… falsifies any information provided in their… requested data.”
“I guess Acadian is busted, again.”
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