It’s two o’clock in the afternoon and you’ve just logged in for your 12.5-hour shift.  As you lean back in your chair and settle into your work console, you’re perfectly comfortable.  The desk wrapped around you is at exactly the right height for you, and you can adjust it up or down whenever you want to.  Your lumbar-supporting chair cradles your back and hips you as you roll around on the mat below.  The lighting is adjusted to your preference.  You even have your own personal thermostat to control, so your workstation is as warm or cool as you like.

Whatever information you need is at your fingertips.  You’ve got eight screens in your field of vision, and a laptop in addition.  Three keyboards, three mice, and a button at your waist are ready to respond to your every command.  When you speak or listen on your headset, status lights across the workstations illuminate in colors like red, blue, and green, so that no one interrupts you when you’re focused.  

Your workstation – one of four in the room – is located in one of the most safe and secure buildings possible.  An EF3 tornado could scour the neighborhood, and the windowless, concrete-block fortress you are in would remain.  If the power were knocked out, a generator would keep you in business for weeks.  If one of the heating or cooling units failed, another would kick on in its stead.  

You’re receiving the first call of your shift.  Your heart rate ticks up a couple of beats per minute.

What will it be?  Someone who’s locked their keys in their car or lost their dog?  Or the discovery of a suicide, or an accident, or a plane crash?

Whatever it is, the person on the other end of the line is counting on you.  You are the “first” first responder.

If your heart rate ticked up a couple of beats per minute just thinking about that scenario, then perhaps you’ve gained a new appreciation and respect for Washington County’s 9-1-1 telecommunicators.  This team of 14 works out of the Emergency Communications Center located at the Orchard Hill complex in Washington every day.  

To get people the help they need in an emergency, the 9-1-1 dispatchers work in teams.  

“When Lydia, let’s say, answers the 9-1-1 call, she can hear it in her headset.  These guys both will pick up and they’ll listen,” Supervisor Cara Sorrells explains.  “She will start to get the information.  And what she’s working on there is where she types what the type of call is and what is needed, what units she wants to put on there. And while she’s doing all that and asking the questions, one of these people back here will automatically be paging people out, because they will have heard what it is, where it’s at.  It maps for them; they get the information too. So, it’s kind of a seamless team.” 

On this day, Lydia Houston, Melanie Larson, and Hunter Erwin are working together in the communications center.  They seem at-ease, but they admit the job can be stressful.

“No two days are ever the same,” Sorrells says.  “It’s a roller coaster, you never know what you’re going to get into.”

Friday, March 31 was one of those high-stress days.  The EF4 tornado that whirled across our county late afternoon had dispatchers scrambling to figure out who to help first.

“We had two families that called from the basement and said, ‘Help, the house is on top of us, we can’t get out of our basement.’ And then they had family members calling, worried because they couldn’t reach their family members.  So, those are priorities,” Sorrells says.

“We sent as many people as we can to get there, and trying to get there, there were telephone poles down, there were wires down.  They were like, ‘OK, we can’t go this way.’ So you’re like, ‘Oh, my gosh,’ and then then they’d have to find another way to get there,” Sorrells recollects.  

“In the meantime, we had an injured horse.  It was impaled with debris, which is terribly sad.  But that had to wait until we went and dealt with a lot of other things first.  We just juggled it.  Whatever we could do.”

“A lot of it was actually responders out there,” she continues.  “We had one officer that actually was like, ‘I’m bailing, I need to take cover.’ He was in a squad car, got out, and ran into somebody’s house, into the basement.  They welcomed him in.  His car got damaged because he was too close.”

To decompress after a day like that, the dispatchers have each other to talk to about the experience.  When something really bad happens, a Critical Incident Stress Debriefing (CISD) team will come in to talk to them, as well as the officers, firefighters, or EMS personnel who were out on the call.  But most of the time, the dispatchers have coping mechanisms that work for them.

“I used to work out a lot, and that helped a lot,” Houston says.  “Now I have a two-year-old son, so just trying to relax as much as you can when you’re off and just spend time with family and try to get away from all the stress,” is what she recommends.

And not every call is life-or-death.  Sorrells says maybe 30% of the calls they receive involve life-threatening situations, where someone is not breathing, bleeding, or in cardiac arrest.  The rest are more mundane, and sometimes even funny.

“We get frequent flyers who like to call 9-1-1,” she says.  “You’ve heard about the funny ones.  We get them all the time.  Someone’s drunk and can’t find their cigarettes and they want an officer to come out.”

Larson tells the story of a man whose girlfriend thought he was stupid for getting high, so to show her what stupid really looks like, he called 9-1-1 and asked to be arrested.  Larson honored his request and sent an officer out so the man could turn himself in.

Erwin gets calls from a woman whose chihuahua gets lost at least twice a week.  She “always describes it as having a big head,” he says.  When people call in to report a found dog, he asks, “’Does it have a big head?’ And apparently it does, because everyone answers, ‘Yeah, it does.’ OK, that’s the one.”

A considerable amount of training is required to be a dispatcher.  New hires spend four to six months training on the job, a week at the Iowa Law Enforcement Academy, and three days in emergency medical dispatch training.  Even then, it takes a long time to become comfortable with phones, radios, computers, and training manuals.  

“You’ve got to do everything twice before you’re decent at it, and you may not get something twice ever,” Erwin says.  “It’s always something new, your’re always learning.”

When you think about the infinite range of things that can necessitate a 9-1-1 call, including medical emergencies, hazmat spills, high speed pursuits, and accidents, it’s easy to see why it may take a full three years to become comfortable at your job.

As Sorrells says, “Nobody calls here because they’re having a good day.  It’s always on their worst day.”

The dispatchers give up a lot to be of service.  Work-life balance isn’t achievable when your help is required whenever the next emergency strikes.

“These people have missed children’s events, birthdays, holidays.  You can’t get that back,” Sorrells says.

But for the telecommunicators – Sorrells, Larson, Erwin, and Houston, as well as their colleagues Sandy Lovetinsky, Teresa Todd, Issak Kleese, Shelley Reed-Wulf, Brittany Stutzman, Delainey Parish, Riley Thomann, Rachel Swaffer, Carrie Rich, and Aspen Bromell – the upside is worth the sacrifice.

“I think the reason we all do it is I think it makes us feel good,” Sorrells says.  “We help people every day.  Even though it doesn’t seem like a vehicle unlock is [a big deal], if there’s a baby in the car crying and its hot, and they call you and the mom’s upset because they left their keys in the car, you’ve helped them.”

“That’s what you do.  Every phone call.”