“911 People” Devin Greaney, Freelance Writer, From THE GOOD LIFE, August, 2003

A calm moment at Austin Police Dispatch

Public safety in this area is nothing new, but always evolving. The Texas Rangers were formed while Texas was still a part of Mexico. That same year, 1835, Dr. Thomas Anderson moved to Webberville in Travis County. He had no office but provided mobile medical care on on horseback. In case of ememgency someone was sent to find Dr. Anderson. The Travis County Sheriff’s Department was formed in 1840 and a year later seven loosely organized Austinites began what is now the Austin Fire Department. The police department first hit the streets in 1851. Austin began getting telephone service in June of 1881 and it is a safe bet that soon afterwards was a call for help. Then in 1934 radios gave instant communication from headquarters to police cars. Just over one hundred years after phones came to Austin, specifically December 10, 1981, a new phone number came to town looking for trouble - 911. Sooner or later almost everyone will make that call for themselves or others.

For the last eleven of those years part of that job has been performed by John Mckenzie. He is one of 79 call takers for Austin 911 and 311 located on the fourth floor of the Police building downtown. The dark room of cubicles does not look much different from any other call center answering customer questions, taking orders or telemarketing. For many in trouble he is the first voice they hear when making a call for help. “Austin 911. Do you need police, fire or EMS?” he begins every call. After his calm voice is used to take control of a sometimes not so calm caller, he sends the information to a police dispatcher or transfers the caller to fire or EMS dispatch who then relay the call to the officers, fire station or ambulance. If the call is not an emergency it goes to 311, designed for such calls. While this reporter listened in, Mckenzie took a call on an illegally parked car on Medical Parkway. A convenience store clerk on South I 35 called in saying an obnoxious customer pored syrup on his counter. There was someone on a bus at First and Riverside complaining of neck pains and a burglar alarm near 7th and Rio Grande. Mckenzie said it was a slow morning.

Mckenzie’s office takes calls that originate in the city limits or, if outside the city, transfers to Travis County’s call center on Johnny Morris Road, which has 26 dispatcher/call takers and takes calls for and from unincorporated areas of the county. Pflugerville, Lakeway, Lago Vista and West Lake Hills have their own dispatch centers.

“Hours of boredom followed by seconds of adrenaline- filled excitement,” is how Mckenzie described the work environment. “Kind of like what the officer finds on the streets,” he added, but he is glad he is in the office not a police officer. “I don’t have to worry about getting shot up here,” Mckenzie said. Austin call takers work eight hour shifts but can work up to 24 hours of overtime per week. Today he was working 16 hours. Call takers get 160 hours of training but he says for calltakers “flexibility is the #1 key. You need not to get rattled about things,” he said. “I like the job. You can make a difference. You can help people in all situations,” Mckenzie said. “Another thing I like is the people who work here. We’re all on the same page,” he added.

Linda French, assistant manager for Emergency Communications, has been with Austin Police for 16 years, but has worked in dispatch for 32. She says if people are not sure about who to talk to, 911 is often who they call. There is a belief “we know everything,” French said. A December, 1999 dust storm prompted “40 calls in three minutes” to 911 in Burnet County west of Austin, according to press accounts. Right after the attacks in New York and Washington, locals started calling Austin 911. “Oh my God, what’s happening?” French said was the typical tone of a call that day. Students will even use 911 avoid a test by calling a bomb threat so school is evacuated. Such behavior is a class B misdemeanor which means up to a $2,000 fine and 180 days in jail.

This job “makes you want to be a bigger person than you are,” French said. Management deals with employee stress on all jobs, from annoying customers, to long hours to unrealistic deadlines. But here stress is compounded. “Everyday I get yelled at,” is a common complaint from employees. “We can go from 0 to 120 miles per hour with just one phone call,” she said. Then it is time to settle down again. “We may get a call from someone saying ‘I’m gonna kill myself and I don’t want my wife to find out ’ then you hear a gunshot and the next call is a dog barking,” she said.

A porcelain figure of Don Quixote in her office reminds her to “fight for the underdog.” “We try to make the job as normal as we can because we are not a normal job. No one calls to say how well their life is going,” she said. French keeps a bag of chocolates and tissue in her office for employees who may be brought to tears. The Austin Police Department gives employees access to Victim’s Services, chaplains and psychologists but “for the most part we take care of each other,” Mckenzie said. Helping the employees keep up their morale, French offers recognition such as employee of the month and employee of the year. There is a monthly newsletter (ALL POINTS BULLETIN), time off when needed and the staff is even working on a cookbook of recipes from 911 and 311 employees.

Lynn Mullins started in 1990 in Round Rock, Texas, a town of about 31,000 people. Since then she has watched the town balloon into a city that counted 61,000 residents in the last census and is now telecommunications supervisor for the police and fire department. Growth has been arguably the biggest story of the last decade. “It’s been a growing process. When I started we had two dispatchers on the day side, two in the evening and one from 11 PM to 7 am,” Mullins said. Now normal staffing is four dispatchers. Unlike the Austin call center the dispatcher answers the phone and staffs the radios. Mullins says a good dispatcher has “multitasking ability to listen to the radio and to answer that phone and still know what’s going on around them,” she said.

A road-rage incident on Round Rock’s south side had dispatchers Susan Camacho talking to one party and George Cantu talking to the other during this reporter’s visit. Camacho was talking to one driver offering to send police (which was done) but de-escalating the angry motorist at the same time. She was encouraging the drivers to separate themselves. “We don’t want anymore trouble,” Camacho told the driver. Holly Kline was working one day last September when two teenage girls were killed by a train and she took the initial call and even spoke with the victim’s family members. Several officers and agencies responded to the accident. “It was really interesting the team work between the dispatchers,” she said. When emotions like anger, fear, excitement and depression are felt by callers someone is there to provided a reasoned voice.

The ability to calm down an angry or suicidal caller is “something they either have or don’t have,” according to Mullins. “We screen prior to employment and the few the screening doesn’t catch are usually found out early in training,” she added.

Mullins started dispatching at the Lakeway police department. She was “desperate for a job,” she said when a man she was dating told her Lakeway needed a dispatcher. “I didn’t know what a dispatcher was,” she said. After a few years she made the transition to Round Rock. Her greatest satisfaction? “Saving a life is about the best thing in the world,” she said. But one group of calls always stay with her. “Children calls are the ones I can’t forget when children die or get hurt,” she said. Mullins believes she can remember every call she has taken that involved children.

The department gives the employees access to a health club, provides stress management classes and gives tips on health and nutrition to keep the job from affecting the health of employees.

Texas Drifter, a friendly German Shepherd, rested in front of Yiya’s Mexican restaurant. There was hardly a car or noise in downtown Johnson City. 11 am on a weekday in Blanco County, Texas has an entirely different feel than the other areas profiled. For a comparison to Austin, the population is about about a thousand less than a typical UT basketball game. The Blanco County Sheriff’s office had taken one call for help since midnight, a disturbance at a bar.

Supervisor Lydia Bledsoe has worked for the Sheriff’s department since 1984. Working with her was dispatcher Henry Young along with the call taker, the jailer, receptionist, the jail cook and the cleaner - Henry Young. She has seven employees who work by themselves or with one other dispatcher. They may be doing jailer duties when 911 is called so a baby monitor stays by the phone when the dispatcher/jailers are attending to other functions. Her office dispatches calls for Sheriffs, police, fire and EMS departments throughout the county.

Young was a jailer in Georgia and moved to Texas about a year ago. “I like all aspects of working with the jail and dispatch,” he said. “This is the first time I have been in the position where you have to do it all,” Young said. There are typically five people held in the county’s historic 1894 jail.

“I was raised in Blanco knowing everyone and everywhere,” Bledsoe said. It is helpful to know who is in trouble and where to find them. Until about two years ago many people did not have addresses. It was instead directions like “white house, blue door three miles up county road 1323, North of US 281.” Bledsoe said there is a disadvantage to being familiar with the locals “when you have a call and it is someone you are really close to and they had a heart attack or wreck and (you are) trying to remain clam,” she said.

One significant change in emergency communications came to Austin with little fanfare September 27, 1985. Cellphones were a luxury for the rich (400 minutes cost $181 a month according to newspaper stories at the time). Now portable phones have plans more in line with the general public’s budget and are found in the purses and pockets of everyone from attorneys to CEO’s to construction workers to junior high school students. Police, fire, EMS and now the vox populi have access to mobile communications. A few years ago finding a car wreck with injuries between Bastrop and Elgin meant driving to the closest business and calling for help. Precious time wasted while the bleeding and pain continued. Any angry ex-boyfriend could be driving down the highway with a gun chasing his one-time love. The driver could not stop to call, but instead pray the police happen to see. Now those calls can be made saving time in the race against death. Cellphones are an emergency responders best friend.

That is one version. The other side of the story is a wreck or fire may receive twenty calls at once tying up phone lines. Mckenzie said people will call to report a fire while they can hear sirens in the background. “Why don’t you tell the man in the big red truck?” is what Mullins wants to say to such callers, but doesn’t. Callers sometimes have no clue where they are. A “land line” will instantly tell where the caller is, but cellphones can not at this time. There is also the problem of cellphones accidentally dialing 911. Sounds of someone walking down the street are heard when an important call needs to get in. One person who did not want their agency to be identified remembered a call of a woman screaming. The call taker tried to calm the woman to find out where she was and what was happening but all she was doing was yelling without saying anything. After the woman stopped screaming the mystery was solved. With out getting too detailed, lets just say a tape of the call would a be a big hit on the Howard Stern show.

A man called Austin 911 shortly after 1 am Christmas night to wish all emergency workers a Merry Christmas. On the other extreme there is the stuff of nightmares. Austin call taker Chris Contreras received a letter of accommodation for calming down an intoxicated, suicidal man with a gun to his head just a couple days later. French remembered one new call taker was on the phone her first day solo. The second call she took was a woman yelling “he’s coming to get me!” and then a gunshot. The line remained open while the woman fell next to the phone and the call taker could hear blood rushing from her heart. “It sounded like the phone was in a washing machine,” said French. Two shots later the woman, her daughter and the shooter where all dead. The call taker was given three days off to recover. When she returned to work, a caller shot himself while on the phone before the call taker could say anything more than “please don’t...” The call taker took off her headset and resigned. “Who could blame her?” French said. “What in life can prepare you for that.”

Another frustration Barby Edie, community education liaison for the Austin Police Department, sees is “lack of closure,” she said. Call takers hear the initial call for help but seldom hear how the problem was resolved. One notable exception was several years ago when an Austin call taker took a call from a woman whose husband had just been killed in an accident. He kept her on the line to comfort her. The call taker remembered her name and number and called later to express sympathy and ask if there is anything he could do for her. She said she needed her grass cut, so he came out to her house with a lawn mower. “That’s not part of your job, that’s part of your caring.” French said. The grass cutting went to friendship between the two, the friendship went to dating then the two were married.

Call taker Zoila Perez is usually on the 10 PM to 6 am shift. This Saturday night she was also working overtime. One thing she has learned in her almost two years on the job “As long as you leave the job at work you are fine. Some people have a problem doing that.” Despite the gravity of the job, Dave Oney, another call taker on the shift, says he sees humor in the job could be turned into a comedy sketch ALA “Saturday Night Live”. (caller: “This is Pizza Hut. A customer’s water just broke!” dispatcher: “Get her another cup!” and he hangs up ) Another working that night, Charlotte Harris, wrote a book “Happy Life,” a romance novel set in a 911 call center and hopes to get it published.

A chime sound on the headset signaled our first call, a wreck on IH-35 and Rundberg. Location is the number one piece of information a call taker needs, followed by the caller’s name and what is going on. It all seems intuitive, but thirty seconds after someone’s car has been hit at night on a cold, crowded Interstate frontage road, it’s her job to think for them and ask a lot of pointed, close ended questions. “A lot of times people think you’re insensitive because you don’t show emotion but you can’t,” Perez said. Her fingers flowed over her keyboard in almost superhuman speed (42 words per minute is the required typing speed), moving up and down different fields on the screen as she received new information from the caller. She makes the synopsis of the call brief but descriptive for the officer and the dispatcher.

An infant was having a seizure in the Great Hills area. Those calls are transferred to EMS dispatch but Perez listened in case police were needed such as evidence a crime may have been committed. EMS dispatch is staffed with Emergency Medical Technicians and paramedics to provide instructions on caring for the patient before help arrives. Security apprehended a runaway at a South Austin movie theater. “How do you know he’s a runaway?” Perez asked the caller. The caller advised he was the manager and received a description from his mother. Again, pointed questions. Another South Austinite was complaining about a speeder on his residential street. “You have to train your hearing as to what to hear,” she said. Perez pointed out the caller gave three different addresses. Her bilingual ability came in handy when a Spanish speaker in North Austin drank to much and was feeling very sick. He added he had a history of heart problems.

A man on Manchaca called for a neighbor who he heard through second-hand information was ill. The EMS dispatcher had to get through a lot of “huh?” and keep the sometimes rambling caller on the subject. The quivering voice of a man in the West Campus area called when he found his car gone. “Do you see any tow away signs?” she asked. While on the line he found a wrecker driver who told him the car was towed. Near Oltorf and Lamar, a man received a threatening phone call from a relative of a man he had an argument with earlier in the day. He was coming over. “Did he say if he had any weapons?” asked Perez. A woman in an apartment complex on Duval Road heard a couple screaming at each other and the line, “you will not take my daughter!” Perez says the job has made her more aware of her surroundings and safety. She does not envy the police officer’s jobs.

Unsung heroes” is a phrase given to many people. Television has many dramas about cops, doctors, fire fighters and paramedics but generally heroism starts with a call. From a sprained ankle to a shooting, you can be guaranteed one of these people will try to take control of the chaos with “911. What is your emergency?”

NOTE:

Information on Dr. Anderson courtesy AESCULAPIUS ON THE COLORADO by Dr. James Coleman.