Behind the phone lines with dispatchers

By JOE MARIO PEDERSEN Orlando Sentinel

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — “What’s your emergency?”

Gregory Johnston, a dispatcher with Orange County Fire Rescue, calmly responds to what is being described as one woman’s extremely bad day.

The woman started having chest pains which led her into a car accident earlier in April in Apopka.

Johnston sat in a darkly lit room, most of the illumination coming from the seven computer screens he has in front of him, while listening to the caller.

In the span of about 60 seconds, Johnston obtained the location, the nature of the problem, a call back number, provided the nearest fire department with appropriate information and reassured the woman that everything was going to be OK.

Everything Johnston gathered and performed in that 60 seconds is standard operation in the life of dispatch.

It’s often overlooked when thinking about emergency operations.

The hours are long.

The job is thankless.

The turnover is high, and yet Orange County Fire Rescue’s dispatchers are one of the most important cogs in the emergency response machine.
Johnston, an assistant supervisor who has been with dispatch for more than 20 years, has seen a lot of folks come and go.

“This job is not for everybody,” Johnston said. “If you can’t deal with stress or you take things personally or you don’t like long hours, this is not the job for you.”

OCFR has one of the largest coverage zones in the Sunshine State, as a result the dispatch receives a huge amount of calls — 124,006 just from 2018, according to OCFR’s annual report.
The dispatch center is currently understaffed with 36 employees. The 2018 annual report listed 57 dispatchers at the end of the year.

Currently the department is seeking to fill out its ranks to 52 dispatchers.

As things stand right now, dispatchers are working on average an additional 20 hours of overtime tacked onto their 40 hour work weeks.

“Oh, I’m sure they want to hire more people as fast as they can,” Johnston said laughing about overtime. “The long hours, that’s truly the hardest part — being away from your family so long.”
On the topic of family, there are some rare occurrences where a dispatcher picks up the phone and a family member is on the other line having an emergency.

“It’s pretty rare, but it does happen from time to time,” Johnston said.

Like the time Johnston picked up the line and listened to his aunt enter a cardiac event in 2015.

Barbara Young, 82 at the time, called 911. Johnston picked up the phone and recognized his aunt’s voice.

“It was a little more than personal for me than anything before,” he said.

But he stayed professional, got the essential information and his aunt survived.

“911 dispatchers are the actual lifeline between those who need help and those emergency personnel who respond to that need,” said Orange County Mayor Jerry L. Demings in reference to National Telecommunicators Week observed earlier in April. “While they often work behind the scenes, what they do is so critical. I’m very much appreciative of their service, as are the many residents and visitors in our community who have had to call upon them in their moment of need.”

Dispatchers abide by a very strict guideline of responses for the most common kinds of scenarios. The call center’s stringent process earned it an accreditation from the International Academies of Emergency Dispatch, which is a global organization which recognizes emergency call centers that exemplify the standard of excellence.

Christopher Englehart, 27, started work as a dispatcher earlier this year. He was a former cake decorator at Publix Super Markets.

One of the big reasons that motivated Englehart to join dispatch was watching the men and women who served on June 12, 2016 after the massacre at the Pulse Night Club, Englehart said.
“Watching the Sheriff’s Office and Fire Rescue do what they did that day, it moved me into this field as well,” he said. “I want to help people.”

Some of the more common calls the center receives are concerns about chest pain, but Englehart’s first call was about a bomb threat at Wekiva High School.

Six weeks before, he was training on the first floor of Orange County Fire Rescue’s headquarters, beneath the call center, and going over how to respond to various scenarios. He was already reasonably nervous on his first day of the job but his first call didn’t leave him time to think about his anxiety. He said it pushed him into the deep end of the pool and — to his surprise — he began swimming.

“There’s no amount of preparation downstairs that they can give you that will completely prepare you for up here,” Englehart said.

He recorded the information about possible suspects in the area armed with weapons and informed the fire crew where to go until Orange County Sheriff’s Office gave the all clear.
Luckily, it was a false alarm, but the experience acclimated Englehart quickly.

“People on the street don’t know I am a dispatcher,” Englehart said. “It’s one of those jobs that you never see. You just hear about it. And while everyone wants to be recognized for what they do, making sure people get what they need is what is most important to me.”
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Information from: Orlando Sentinel, http://www.orlandosentinel.com/

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