A 911 Call Four Years Ago Stirs Up Pre-Election Controversy

At around 9:30 p.m. on June 9, 2019, Pine Plains resident Frances Silvert, then 83 years old, fell at her home on Lake Road and fractured her hip. The amount of time it took for emergency services to respond to her 911 call has become a central element in the race for the open seat in the Dutchess County legislature between Republican incumbent Gregg Pulver and Democrat Chris Drago. Last week, it also became a source of contention between Silvert and Pine Plains Town Supervisor Brian Walsh.

Silvert is Drago’s aunt. He has often said the long wait for an ambulance—Silvert and two family members with her that night told the Herald it took at least two hours—is one of the main reasons he chose to run for the District 19 seat. At the Pine Plains Meet the Candidates forum on Oct. 18 (available in its entirety on YouTube), Drago said, “Our EMS service volunteers are doing a tremendous amount of work. The county does a lot to help the system with great grants and property tax incentives, but it’s not enough. We can and must do better. The minutes of waiting are precious.”

Pulver also said he was aware of EMS problems, noting at the forum that many emergency medical technicians worked for IBM but left the area when the company downsized, that out-of-town employment makes volunteers scarce and that the numbers of paramedic students in Dutchess County training programs plummeted from 185 to 15 over the past decade. “Why?” asked Pulver. “It doesn’t pay; it doesn’t pay.”

But the discussion didn’t end there. A week after the candidates’ forum, The Millerton News published a letter to the editor from Walsh, who is also the Pine Plains fire chief. In it, Walsh disputed Drago’s claim about the response time, writing, ”It turns out the time from the 911 call to an ambulance arriving at the home was only 20 minutes, not 2 hours like Drago said.”

Walsh added, “This candidate is relatively new to our community”—Drago grew up in Clinton Corners and has lived in Stanford for the past five years—”but he should know that we take these accusations seriously because they jeopardize the confidence that people have in the volunteers who dedicate themselves to the fire department.” 

The letter triggered a series of Facebook reactions. Rich Brenner, the Republican candidate for Pine Plains town justice, posted Walsh’s letter and wrote: “As Chairman of the Pine Plains Fire District, I too was astonished to hear legislative candidate Chris Drago’s story of his aunt waiting 2 hours for an ambulance! I had also read this claim in the New Pine Plains Herald. I asked the Chief if he had any knowledge of this and am thankful that he found this claim to be untrue.” Other users posted Walsh’s letter, and Facebook readers weighed in, including Silvert.

In her Oct. 29 response to Walsh, Silvert wrote: “I greatly appreciate the firefighters and EMS who serve our town, but I do not appreciate Brian Walsh choosing partisan politics over talking to me, his constituent. I’m an 87 year old woman and I don’t appreciate being called a liar…. [The] respectable thing to do as an elected official, Fire Chief, and community member in Pine Plains, would have been to pick up the phone and ask me about it. Instead, Brian Walsh chose to call me a liar in a newspaper to gain political advantage for Gregg Pulver.” (The Millerton News published her post on Nov 2.)

After her Facebook post, Silvert contacted Walsh, and they met at the Pine Plains Fire Department on Nov. 1. “Walsh apologized to me,” she said. “He said he should have called me first.” Silvert’s brother, Joe Drago, a former fire commissioner for the town of Clinton, also attended the meeting. He said, “Walsh produced a partial record that began with the 11 p.m. dispatcher’s call to the NDP [Northern Dutchess Paramedics] EMS, and showed the ambulance arrived 20 minutes later. That’s where the 20 minutes he talked about in his letter came from.”

Walsh spoke to the Herald the following day. “I can’t comment as to what happened that night [in 2019], as I wasn’t there. I can only go by the bible of the fire department: the CAD [Computer-Aided Dispatch] report. It’s a record of Dutchess County 911 calls. On the day in question, the report shows the first call was at 22:50 [10:50 p.m.] The ambulance arrived on the scene at 23:13 [11:13 p.m.] and got Mrs. Silvert to the hospital at 12:08 in the morning.” (Dutchess County Emergency Services keeps a record of all 911 calls, but local responders and town fire departments are responsible for their own records.)

The fire chief said he did not read Silvert’s letter; he avoids social media. “I blame Facebook for blowing this whole thing out of proportion,” Walsh said. He added that his letter to the editor was not political: “I was directing my comments at [Chris] Drago, in defense of the fire department. He’s made other comments against us in the past.”

Drago told the Herald, “I knew when I ran for office that political attacks would come, but I didn’t expect them to be aimed at my Aunt Fee, who is 87 years old. When I spoke about the need for more county support for EMS in Northern Dutchess at the Pine Plains candidates’ forum, I shared the story of my Aunt Fee’s two-hour wait for an ambulance to illustrate the need for more resources and county coordination.”

Silvert recalled the events of that June night four years ago to the Herald. “I always let my dogs out at 9, just before I go to bed; that’s why I know when I fell,” she said. “They had just come back in and were waiting for a treat. I didn’t see my toy poodle, Gromit, and I tripped over him.” Silvert’s husband, David, (since deceased), called 911 around 9:30, she said, and two neighbors arrived by 9:45 p.m. telling Silvert they heard the emergency call go out on the radio scanner they monitored.

Joe Drago and his wife, Nancy, drove to Lake Road from Clinton. “We were there by 10:15,” he said. “We were so worried; all we wanted was to bundle her into an ambulance and get her safely to the hospital. The wait was agonizing.”

Silvert said that two Pine Plains Fire Department volunteers stopped by at different times in a nonprofessional capacity. They too had been monitoring the scanner; one waited outside for EMS to arrive.

No help had come by 10:45 p.m., Silvert said, so the family called 911 again. “By that time, we had heard what we presumed was the Stanfordville ‘mutual assistance’ siren go off in the distance,” Joe Drago recalled. (Some first responders have mutual aid agreements: towns help each other across jurisdictional lines in emergencies, including when no EMS workers are available.)

Silvert said the 911 service called her house at 11 p.m. “They told me they had tried all over to get someone to come help me, but had no luck so they were calling Rhinebeck to get the Northern Dutchess Paramedic EMS,” she said. “They showed up 20 minutes later; I finally made it to the ER at 12:12 a.m.”

The 2017 Dutchess County Emergency Medical Services Task Force study sponsored by Marc Molinaro, then the county executive, found that a majority of local EMS forces, including Pine Plains’, have a “non-response” rate of 25%—meaning the first responders are unable to get to the emergency one in four times. A 2021 study commissioned by Dutchess County confirmed those findings. Like most other towns, the Pine Plains Fire Department responded to the majority of calls in under 20 minutes. The 2021 study determined that local first responders are underfunded and understaffed, and that a coordinated solution is needed for the delivery of emergency services to the county.