“911 Central Dispatch, What’s Your Emergency?”

By Amy Hunter
Reporter / Bristol Herald Courier
Published: January 4, 2009

BRISTOL, Va. – Christmas Day, about 5:30 p.m., an infant child swallows a sliver of garland and stops breathing. Her parents call 911.

Thirty seconds later, at a home nearby, a man’s 30-year-old son becomes belligerent after drinking too much at Christmas dinner. The man can’t get his son to leave. He dials 911.

A minute after that, a Smyth County man is thrown from his horse. He is suffering from severe abdominal pain and can’t move.

“911 central dispatch, what’s your emergency?” echoes three times in the vast, white-tiled room on the top floor of the Bristol Virginia Police Department. The question is uttered by three different voices: WandaTaylor, Michelle Lyons and Josh Slagle, three of the select few who are always there when you call – no matter what.

“We’re the AT&T operator, crisis hot line, directory assistance and friend. We call ourselves the Jack, or Jackie, of all trades,” said Wanda Taylor, a 26-year-veteran of emergency dispatch service.

Through the span of her career, Taylor has watched her job evolve. And in the past decade, she has watched it blast into a new era. Technology, and the immediacy it provides, has transformed practically every aspect of emergency dispatching – including the stress of those who work it.

More phones, more calls

Call logs show that the 911 centers on both sides of the Twin City are busier now than ever before. In 2002, the Virginia side answered 10,661 calls. Five years later, the dispatchers said hello nearly 19,000 times – almost double. Yet the city population, estimated at 17,593 in 2007, grew by only 491 people in that five years, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

At the call center in Bristol, Tenn., for the first 11 months of 2008 dispatchers answered 22,102 emergency calls. That side of town has seen even less population growth in those five years, gaining only 144 new residents to hit 25,474 in 2007.

The increasing number of emergency calls is a national trend. Phones rang in dispatch centers from coast to coast more than 240 million times in 2006, according to the National Emergency Number Association.

911 operators across the country are overburdened, said Bristol Virginia Police Sgt. Miles Brunson, who oversees dispatch at the department.

With the advent of cellular technology, their profession entered a new age, Brunson said. The more cell phones people get, the more calls 911 gets, he said.

Not only are there more phones, but people are more likely to call 911 for any reason. And with each advancement, say texting, comes the need for more money to accommodate it.

“Say you can’t talk,” Brunson said. “Say you’re in a bank robbery and are crouched down. If you text 911,  I mean, we’re not gonna get that.”

But the biggest difficulty with cell technology is being able to pinpoint the location of the caller. Not all phones and not all call centers have that nailed down: because different service providers use different technologies in their phones and in their towers; because some phones have GPS, some don’t; because some centers have mapping software and some don’t; because some centers lack the capacity to accept all wireless lines.

“Nine times out of 10 when you get 911 calls [from a cell phone] just the cell number will pop up on the screen, and we usually ask them for the closest landmark to find them,” Taylor said.

Part of the problem, Brunson said, is the unprecedented speed of today’s technological advancement. The communications industry is market driven, which means corporate giants spitfire new products at consumers in efforts to one-up the capabilities of competitor products. And as long as folks are buying, companies will keep producing, he said.

“We can’t keep up,” Brunson said. “We’re not as technologically advanced as we need to be now, our personnel have trouble keeping up and we just don’t have enough money.”

On Brunson’s wish list: Getting that text message from the bank customer and seeing the geographic coordinates of the cell caller’s location pop up on his computer screens.

Technological advances

The Federal Communications Commission has mandated that all cell phone providers ensure that those geographic locations - by longitude and latitude - are popping up on dispatch screens by 2012.

Cell providers working with local governments are expected to make that happen by using the 911 tax included on all cell phone bills.

It’s a far cry from when Taylor started dispatching in the early 1980s. Cell phones didn’t exit then. Neither did the Internet, at least not in its modern form. Remember those old-school IBM’s – the ones with the green letters that glowed on black screens? They were as hi-tech as it got.

When Taylor started, dispatchers did their job by hand, using a pen and pad and a corded telephone.

Today, the 49-year-old sits in a swivel chair behind four computer screens. One shows an aerial view of Bristol complete with coordinates; another is a touch screen, greased with an occasional fingerprint and cluttered with overlapping boxes that look like pop-ups, but aren’t. The boxes and the screens are filled with information that helps the dispatchers track or contact callers, other 9-1-1 centers and the police and firefighters.

Seated a few feet from Taylor is Michele Lyons, the senior officer in charge of the second shift’s three-strong team. Like Taylor, she is a decades-long veteran of 9-1-1 communications and has experience in several related fields.

Lyons, Taylor and Josh Slagle, the team’s newest member, each work four computers, six phone lines, radio scanner traffic and an infinite pool of human complication. All three agreed the advancements have enhanced their abilities, but there is just one core tool that’s absolutely essential to communication officers: a telephone. And it’s this fact that highlights the amusing irony of their lofty office – there’s barely a single phone in sight.

The clunky touchtone handset has been upgraded; divvied into headsets, computer screens with touch-graphic dial pads, and buttons to press to connect.

Also gone is the clamor of ringing phones. Instead, a dulcet chime tings electronically from each computer’s modest speaker.

The human touch

“It takes a very special kind of person to able to do this job,” Lyons said. “You never know what you’re gonna get. It could be life or death, and it’s all on you.”

To characterize the job as multi-tasked would be a gross understatement, she said; it’s more like dozen-tasking.

Taylor, Lyons and Slagle are the first point of contact for every sort of emergency on this side of the city. They handle every call: fire, police and EMS. And that’s on top of the accidental callers, lonely callers, regular callers and crank callers. When the phone lines blow up in there, Lyons said, they blow up fast and furiously. And then, just like that, the room lulls into long, settled stretches.

With each call, a dispatcher has about two seconds to assess the nature of the situation and react accordingly. Older diabetic fainted? Get EMS and send them to the correct address. Drunk and angry ex-boyfriend? Locate the closest police officer and be prepared to call an ambulance. Suicide? Don’t. Let’s talk it through.

It’s same story on the other side of town, said Virginia Smelser, head of the 911 call center in Bristol, Tenn.

“Most dispatchers burn out pretty quick,” Smelser said. “You hear the worst the situation could possibly be, you hear all the bad stuff, and most of the time there’s no resolution. Once you pass it on, you never find out what happened.”

Added to that, “You don’t have the luxury of saying ‘Oh gosh, I should have done that differently, I think I’ll go back and change it,” she said.

Lyons took the Christmas caller with the choking infant. Her task: focus; drown out distractions; and get information from a hysterical parent by asking calm, measured questions.

“Is the child crying or coughing?” she asked. “Sir, sir, I need you to tell me if the child is crying or coughing. You may need to perform CPR, sir.”

A brief pause.

Then, she takes a deep breath.

“Thank God,” she whispers to herself.

“Sir, if the child is crying, then she’s going to be OK. I’ve got an ambulance is on its way.”

All six phone lines were blowing up while Lyons handled the call. She had EMS on another line at the same time, and she switched deftly between the two – unbeknownst to the parent. In the background, Taylor was talking excitedly back and fourth with Slagle, they were grappling with several calls and shouting questions to one another. Lights blinked on all sorts of devices, various electronic twangs sounded and it seemed impossible to tell who was talking to whom, on what line and about what.

For them, it was just another quiet afternoon.

“I don’t care how good of a multi-tasker you are. When call volume doubles, and fast, and you’re either without the equipment you need or grappling with new technology, things drop,” Brunson said.

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