Could she have been saved? Was anyone dispatched to help?
A chilling 9-1-1 call from a woman who died during Tropical Storm Chantal has raised new questions about the response of local emergency services to this tragedy.
This desperate call to Alamance County’s 9-1-1 Center was apparently the last communication that anyone had with 23-year-old Hajar Hassib before her car was engulfed by the rising floodwaters that Chantal churned up last Sunday.
Hassib’s fate remained unknown until that Tuesday when law enforcement officials followed up on a missing person report that her family had filed with Graham’s municipal police force. The city’s police officers ultimately tracked Hassib’s cell phone to a location off of Jim Minor Road – where, with help from the local sheriff’s office, they found her car submerged in a pond. The young woman’s body was later recovered from the waterlogged vehicle, bringing the search for Hassib to a bitter conclusion.
Graham’s police department went on to issue a news release in which it revealed the role that Hassib’s family had in jumpstarting the search for the missing 23-year-old. In the meantime, the police department’s initial efforts brought the case to the attention of the sheriff’s office – as sheriff Terry Johnson conceded in an interview earlier this week.
“We had no knowledge of the case until Graham notified us about it on [last] Tuesday morning,” Johnson told the newspaper on Wednesday, “and we then worked with Graham to identify the location of her phone.”
Unbeknownst to the agencies that took part in this search, the county’s 9-1-1 center had previously received word of Hassib’s dire predicament when the young woman herself placed an emergency call in the midst of last Sunday’s deluge.
The Alamance News has received written information about this fateful phone call in response to a public records request to the county’s legal department. County attorney Rik Stevens replied to the newspaper on Wednesday with call data from the 9-1-1 center’s computerized dispatching system as well as transcript of the emergency phone call.
According to the call data, Hassib contacted the 9-1-1 center at 10:56 p.m. last Sunday night from a location near a pond at the juncture of South Jim Minor Road and Millbrook Drive. She described the location as being on South Jim Minor Road.
The call was answered by Taylor Smith, a six-year veteran of the 9-1-1 center who remained on the line with Hassib until she lost the connection shortly before 11:00 p.m.
During their four-minute conversation, Hassib informed the 9-1-1 dispatcher that her car had been swept up by the flood, and water was seeping into the vehicle. The call data indicates that Smith assigned the incident a response level “Echo” – the highest of the five categories that the 9-1-1 center uses to rate the urgency of an emergency.
[Story continues below photos.]
The transcript that Stevens shared with the newspaper provides additional details about the severity of Hassib’s situation.
Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. Ma’am, I’m literally like dying right now, I can’t get out of my car. . . Oh my God, please help, please help. . . . Oh no, no, no, no, it’s sinking really fast.”
– Hajar Hassib’s pleas during 9-1-1 call on Sunday, July 6, during Tropical Storm Chantal
The record begins with a rush of words from the caller, who frantically states that her “car is flooding,” the engine won’t crank, and her “windows are closed.” Smith breaks in to ask for the caller’s location.
“Um, South Jim Minor Road,” Hassib replies. “Can you please hurry? Like, the water’s coming in really bad.”
Smith assures the caller that “her partner” will dispatch a rescue unit – an assertion she makes again later on in the call, before she tries to elicit more information about Hassib’s location and the nature of her emergency. The dispatcher asks whether the water level is rising outside the vehicle or actually breaching the interior.
“It’s coming up, it’s coming up,” the caller replies. “I can’t get out.”
Smith then tries to help Hassib extricate herself from the vehicle. She begins by instructing the caller to unfasten her seatbelt and unlock the doors.
“The door is unlocked, but it won’t budge,” the caller says.
“Alright, listen,” the dispatcher continues. “You must get out of the vehicle and on top of the roof. Can you open a window on the side the water is coming from?”
“None of the windows would open,” the caller adds in repetition of her initial statement to the dispatcher.
Hassib notes that the car’s engine has stalled, rendering the vehicle’s electric windows inoperable. Smith suggests that she may be able to activate them if she turns the key in the ignition without starting the car. At that point, the caller cuts in with a desperate admission.
“Oh my God, oh my God. I’m literally, like, dying right now,” she says. “I can’t get out of my car.”
From there the caller’s statements become increasingly frantic and unintelligible as the car apparently sinks deeper into the floodwater.
“Oh my God, please help, please help,” she says at one point. “Oh, no, no, no, no, it’s sinking really fast.”
Smith continues to prompt the caller on how to get out of the car until she can no longer hear the voice on the other end.
“Is somebody there with you?” she asks. “Hello? Hello? Hello?”
The county attorney’s transcript ends after Smith makes several more attempts to get the caller back on the line – to no avail.
Stevens declined to share an actual recording of Hassib’s 9-1-1 call with the newspaper, insisting that he is legally obligated to provide either a transcript or an edited recording and has selected the former. Those who have heard the recording are unanimous about its emotional tension, with one person calling it as “heartbreaking.”
The harrowing conclusion to the phone call isn’t the end of the 9-1-1 center’s record on this emergency. The center’s call data suggests that another dispatcher tried to call Hassib back at 3:31 a.m. – only to have the call go “straight to v[oice] m[ail].”
Then, at 4:30 a.m., a third operator issued a dispatch order to fire department unit “1D.” Yet, the timestamps for the unit’s response are all zeroed out, suggesting that it never left the garage. The incident is declared “clear” at 4:31 a.m.
Stephen Sigmon, the county’s 9-1-1 director, concedes that there’s any number of reasons to explain this seemingly phlegmatic response to Hassib’s emergency. For one thing, he recalled that the 9-1-1 center received more than 3,800 calls on the day of the storm – more than four times the usual volume.
“Not only were we taking our calls, but we were taking Orange County’s calls as well,” he explained in an interview Wednesday. “Four, five, six hundred of their calls rolled over to us.”
Sigmon said that the explosion of phone calls is quite likely why it took the 9-1-1 center four and a half hours to make a return call to Hassib’s cell phone. Meanwhile, he offered the perilous state of the roads as one reason why the center’s dispatch order doesn’t appear to have spurred any action from fire crews.
“It could mean that they were dispatched out, but it was too dangerous, or they were notified and resources were an issue,” he said.
In the end, there was no concerted effort to track down Hassib until her family contacted Graham’s police department on Monday. The subsequent result of the department’s search has been widely reported as an example of the human toll of last week’s tropical storm, which ultimately claimed six lives as it ravaged the Carolinas.
The search ultimately led investigators to a roadside pond on South Jim Minor Road, just south of Turner Road.
According to a July 8 press release from the Graham police department, “Alamance County Rescue responded with specialized equipment, including dive teams, to aid in the search effort. During the operation, a submerged vehicle was located and recovered from the pond. Tragically, Ms. Hassib was found inside the vehicle and was pronounced deceased at the scene.”
Graham’s police chief, Kristi Cole Baker expressed her condolences to the woman’s family and friends “during this unimaginable time.”
The nature of this natural disaster has persuaded the county attorney that there’s little, if anything, that the 9-1-1 center could’ve done to change the outcome of Hassib’s case.
“The call volume was 400 percent of what we normally get,” Stevens said in an interview Wednesday, “and from what I have heard, I don’t know if the result would have been any different under the circumstances.”
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