SOUTHPORT — With less than a year on the job, communications specialist Sarah Kirkland already has had a man with a hole in his pocket call 911 for help tracking the money he’d lost.
“There’s crazy calls, like, ‘You’re calling 911 for this,’ ” Kirkland said.
Kirkland is one of the 20 communications specialists for the Bay County Sheriff’s Office who took a combined total of nearly 350,000 emergency and administrative calls in 2013 at the county Emergency Operations Center.
Each answers an average of more than 1,000 calls a month, and the fact that April 13-19 is National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week doesn’t mean Kirkland and the other dispatchers won’t field about 325 calls each this week.
And that’s not counting the calls for ambulances and fire. Even without them, “we still have a large amount on our plate,” communications supervisor Terre Hall said.
The callers will be scared, suicidal, confused and angry enough to cuss out the stranger on the other end of the phone — even while they demand help. Regardless of who they are, what they need or how badly they treat the dispatcher, they’re going to get help, Hall said.
“We’re here no matter what,” Hall said.
And even as she answers questions about her job, Hall is taking 911 calls; an angry 10-year-old has just run off into the woods. Hall, who’s been answering 911 calls “most of my adult life,” doubts the child is in any danger, but every call receives the same treatment.
“You don’t ever take anything lightly,” she said. “You don’t ever assume.”
Behind the scenes
Communications specialists are the people behind the scenes. In most emergencies, they are the first point of contact for someone in trouble. They deal with pressure and stress on the phone to reduce the stress on the deputy they’re sending to the scene.
They deal with drunks and druggies, with the mentally ill. They deal with seniors who live alone and might not talk to anyone else all day.
And they deal with the callers who have a slightly different definition of the word emergency. For instance, Hall took a call during Spring Break from a man from out of town who sounded a little drunk when he told her he needed some place to go.
The man was in Panama City Beach, so Hall transferred the call to the Beach Police. By then, the caller knew where he needed to go: a strip club.
“You get the funny calls,” Hall said. “They don’t get treated any differently.”
Unless you count the sarcastic jokes and laughter when the call is over.
About a year ago, one communications specialist even had to deal with a marriage proposal from Lt. Rad Nelson called in over the radio. Mrs. Beth Nelson said yes.
“My husband proposed to me over the radio,” she said.
‘They’re family’
While they are perhaps not as tight as the Nelsons’, Hall said tight relationships develop between dispatchers and the deputies on the roads. The deputies’ safety so often depends on the dispatchers’ ability to get critical information and relay it quickly.
“We are their lifeline and our job is to make sure they go home in one piece,” Hall said. “We may not see them, but they’re family.”
It’s when those deputies get in trouble that Hall’s job can take a heavy emotional toll, not that she changes her approach.
The calm, steady voice someone hears when their neighbors won’t turn the music down is the same voice the deputy hears when he’s trapped in his car after a crash. She’s twice had the displeasure of sending out an officer’s final call.
“You do your job,” she said, “and then you fall apart when it’s over.”