Lifeline 911: Carson City dispatchers are the public’s first, first responders

In tense situations, they are the voice of clarity. Twenty four hours a day, seven days a week, public safety dispatchers are the lifeline between those who need help and those who mobilize to provide it.

Carson City's public safety dispatchers were recognized during National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, a time set aside to honor men and women who are voices behind the phone whenever 911 is called.

Personnel from Carson City and Lyon County sheriff’s offices, the state of Nevada and other agencies opened up about a profession that is clearly among the busiest among high pressure jobs in public safety, where seconds matter more than minutes and where being clear, calm and collective can mean the difference in life and death situations.

In Carson City, the dispatch center is 19 members strong, with decades of experience between colleagues, as well as new dispatchers who are receiving on-the-job training and real world experience as part of that essential and critical public safety lifeline.

“The dispatcher sets the tone for calls. They are succinct and the job is to gather as much information as they can, while keeping first responder safety a number one priority,” said Carson City Communications Manager Karin Mracek, a 27-year veteran dispatcher and team leader.

In 2015, the Carson City Sheriff’s Office Communications 911 Center answered 39,426 calls that were for police, fire, medical and city government.

“I am so proud of our dispatchers in Carson City,” said Sheriff Ken Furlong. “They provide the best quality of services out of our regional facility. They are responsible for all of our government entities from public works, police, fire to parks. Their standards are extremely high. They provide the best service for the public and are extraordinary.”

To have a week set aside to honor their work is something that police officers, firefighters and paramedics respond to in kind. Dispatch was treated to a lunchroom filled with assorted tokens of appreciation along with balloons and flowers in the main work area. The dispatchers chose a Paris theme when decorating the office for the week.

“Dispatchers are the unseen heroes behind the scenes,” said Carson City Sheriff’s Office Capt. Brian Humphrey. “They’re that first voice everyone hears when they have an emergency; they are that voice an officer is reaching out to when they need help, and they are the ones making sure the resources are coming to solve any situation.”

Humphrey speaks from experience, having begun his law enforcement career in dispatch.

“Starting out as a dispatcher prepared me in many different ways for handling stressful situations at work and in life,” he said. “The experiences in that position over the years gave me a true appreciation and understanding for everything they do for us and the community.”

Lyon County Sheriff Al McNeil made a special recognition shout out in his weekly Facebook post recognizing the county’s public safety dispatchers as part of telecommunicators week.

“Without them, we could not do our jobs,” he wrote.

Nevada Department of Public Safety has been recognizing dispatchers for their service since the early 1990s.

“Our dispatchers are on the front lines of public safety serving as the true first responders and their support spreads out over varied shifts, 12 hour days, weekends and holidays in a 24/7, 365 days a year,” said Nevada Department of Public Safety’s Communication Center Manager Denise Stewart. “They are responsible for answering emergency and non-emergency calls for all levels of assistance from the public and law enforcement agencies. They determine the nature of the call, location, parties involved and other agencies that need to be notified.”

A typical 12-hour day for a dispatcher is being thrown into situations that are random, spontaneous and sometimes instantaneous. If a dispatcher takes a domestic violence call, they often hear the situation unfold while talking with the victim.

Whether speaking with a victim of a crime or a reporting party calling from the scene of a traffic accident, there are intense emotions that unfold: Panic, fear and shock are among the most common.

The job of a dispatcher then is to extract the vital information as quickly as possible, while calming the caller in the process. A day at work is a constant flow of incoming and outgoing information in which no two calls are the same, said Liz Hertz, who has been a dispatcher for nearly 20 years.

What’s also remarkable to those unfamiliar with how they work: Four dispatchers on duty at any given time each pay simultaneous attention to what their colleagues are working on. They will field questions or replies from each other with their faces planted on five computer monitors and their hands gripped on assorted keyboards.

“People call us, not on the best days of their life, but on the worst days of their life,” said Hertz. “It’s multi-tasking on steroids.”

Dispatcher Donna Milton, who has spent two decades as a dispatcher, said what has kept her in the job is the feeling at the end of the day where she was responsible and helped make a difference in someone’s life.

“What we do is help people. Deputies will tell us, ‘I can’t do your job.’ And we tell them that we can’t do their job. What we do though is work together to get the job done,” said Milton.

And there are days, extraordinary days that seem like anomalies to those on the outside, where critical, separate events can happen in rapid succession. Like a marathon game of darts, multiple situations are thrown at and land squarely into their ears one after the other.

Whether it's 20 calls in a shift, or 40 calls, dispatchers unravel circumstances as quickly, calmly and precisely as possible and relay them to sheriff’s deputies, fire battalion chiefs and ambulance responders who are arriving on scene.

They never know when these extreme higher volume call days will happen, either. But they happen without any warning. Like Friday, March 17, St. Patrick’s Day. Within Milton's shift there were six vehicle accidents, two involving pedestrians, one of whom was critically injured, followed by the worst kind of call a dispatcher can take, that of an unresponsive baby who would die later at the hospital. The tragic event subsequently led to the arrest of a 26-year-old caretaker in connection with the baby’s death. The case remains under investigation.

“It’s a hard job. You don’t leave here at the end of the day without going back and thinking about what you heard on the other line,” Milton said, recalling the day.

Each dispatcher has their own way of dealing with grief through a support network of colleagues, friends and family. Talking about it often relieves the sadness and pressure that comes with the job, Milton said. Dispatchers do talk about their experiences with each other — the good and the bad — to comfort and to learn.

Many times dispatchers won’t know the outcomes those calls from victims of medical calls, heart attacks, strokes or vehicle accidents. There are times when family members or victims will call and offer thanks for being there or that they were instrumental in saving a life, said Hertz. Those calls don’t happen often but when they do, there is both relief and comfort among staff knowing they were there to help someone who was in a crisis.