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Not your typical desk job
Apr 13, 2009 (The Eagle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
Easter has an extra significance for Ray Pheris.
It's on that day, like every other holiday, that he and his co-workers at the Brazos County Emergency Communications District log more than the typical volume of 911 phone calls.
"People will be with their families and sometimes alcohol will get involved -- we tend to get a lot of calls," said Pheris, who is a shift supervisor at the agency.
After 12 years of working as a 911 dispatcher, patterns have emerged so that he knows what days and even hours of the day he will be busy.
The dispatcher headquarters has a television tuned to the Weather Channel and, when radar shows a storm heading toward the Brazos Valley, Pheris knows he can expect some rain.
On Friday and Saturday nights, he can expect to assist police with information as they pull over drunk drivers. Sunday morning means death calls because people often attempt to pick up an elderly family member from church and discover the relative has passed away.
Monday morning often translates into a few people in the community returning to work to find their business has been burglarized over the weekend.
The biggest sign that a shift will be busy is when the power goes out in Bryan, dispatchers said.
In March, the power went out for about 30 minutes and dispatchers received 85 calls to 911 -- more than 10 times the normal amount -- and 108 non-emergency calls.
Many callers simply wanted to know why the power was out or when it would come back on. Betsy Godwin, executive director of the dispatch center, said that those types of calls can cause problems.
"If we are answering calls that are not emergencies, then the actual emergencies are delayed," she said.
As a result, the call center is participating this week in National Public Safety Telecommunications Awareness Week in an effort to educate the public on when it's appropriate to dial 911.
Changing needs and technology
About one-third of 911 calls made across the country are made on wireless phones. Those calls create a slightly different experience and need for dispatchers.
The dispatch center has technology to generate the general location of the phone call, but not as accurately as the listed address attached to a land line. Therefore, the first thing dispatchers ask for is the location of the call.
That information is needed to assess who should respond to the current call, and possibly future ones.
For instance, the center last year had someone dial 911 and hang up 60 times in two hours. Dispatchers looked up the phone number's call records and discovered that someone called from the phone a year earlier to report a car wreck. Though the caller was not involved in the wreck, the dispatcher inquired about her address. They sent a police officer to the house and discovered that the phone had been disconnected and given to a child as a toy. Disconnected cell phones still have the ability to call 911 -- not a widely known fact, but always a problem for headquarters.
Cell phones also create a slight lag time when the dispatcher attempts to answer the phone.
The 60 calls in a matter of hours was extreme, but is part of a broader problem of unnecessary 911 calls. The Brazos County dispatchers -- who handle Bryan and county calls, but not College Station -- usually receive between 5,000 and 7,000 calls to 911 a month.
They generally are short-staffed -- last week they were two workers short of a full team, but a few months ago they had 11 of their 36 positions unfilled. So dispatchers said the unnecessary calls make their work much more difficult and waste precious time.
Demanding work
Late last week, Pheris sat down at his desk for an interview just after handling a death call. Calls to 911 are confidential so he couldn't give specific details, but he said the caller discovered a family member deceased.
"Even if it is clear that the person is dead, we still tell them to perform CPR if they want," Pheris said. "This time they performed CPR until the ambulance arrived."
A call like that is pretty routine for Pheris, but he acknowledged that it is often one of the most important moments in the life of the person at the other end of the line.
"Even the calls that are more important -- even those become ordinary," he said. "Even though it is tense, it is still routine."
The calls that stick with him, he said, are the ones with life-altering results, such as a 2004 robbery of Taqueria Arandas where two robbers were shot, one fatally, while trying to escape with a hostage.
Dispatchers with Brazos County usually work 12-hour shifts. They answer 911 calls, direct and keep track of police officers and firefighters and aid authorities in traffic stops and arrests by looking up suspect information.
Their headquarters is located in downtown Bryan near the Brazos County Courthouse. They sit at desks with multiple computer screens and a box pops up on their computer screen whenever a 911 call comes in.
Sometimes they are involved in manhunts, other times they are the first people to learn about major crimes such as murders and robberies.
"It is a lot more than just sitting at a desk," Pheris said. "It is obviously not physical labor but the mental aspect is pretty demanding.
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http://www.theeagle.com/. Copyright (c) 2009, The Eagle, Bryan, Texas
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