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By SEAN HILLIARD
The Evening Sun (Hanover, Pennsylvania)
In between trading stories and jokes with coworkers during a slow period at work, Phil Hagerman stops to answer the telephone at his desk.
“Adams County 911,” he says calmly, all business again.
The call is about a series of criminal mischief complaints outside Littlestown. Hagerman, a 12-year veteran of the Adams County Department of Emergency Services, was thrilled to finally have some suspects pinned down.
“We’ve been working on this for a couple days now,” he said with a grin as he hurried over to help another dispatcher.
This week has been National Telecommunicator Week for 911 dispatchers. In Adams County, dispatchers celebrated with junk food – bags of Utz potato chips and 20-ounce bottles of Pepsi – that county residents sent to their office at 230 Greenamyer Lane in Straban Township, near the county prison.
Every time a phone rings in the office, the dispatchers answer like they’re expecting to hear from family – calm but curious.
Dispatchers have to be ready for the worst. To do so, they have a large packet of laminated cards to walk them through every imaginable scenario.
For example, if the answer to the question “Is the patient bleeding severely?” is “yes,” Hagerman can instantly flip to the section that deals with quick, temporary ways to stop the bleeding until paramedics arrive.
A dispatcher, Jim Shenk, called out across the room that “Phil knows all of the people wanted for warrants.” That reminded Hagerman of the time a college student on an office tour wanted him to check if she had any warrants.
It turned out she was wanted for a parking violation.
“I told her to make sure she took care of it,” he said with a shrug. “I could have called a squad car out.”
It would have been easy, too. Just a click of a button on the computer screen and he’d instantly be in touch with Pennsylvania State Police at Gettysburg.
The computerized system dispatchers now use is meant to be easy and requires little paperwork. It looks like the dashboard of a spaceship, with four computer monitors lined up next to one another.
Despite appearances, it’s very easy to understand.
Hitting the space bar answers a call, and brings up a screen with all of the vital information they can trace. Dispatchers once filled out 3- by 8-inch cards after every call at the old offices in the basement of the Adams County Courthouse.
“Some of the dispatchers had bad handwriting, so it was like, ‘What the heck’s this?’ when trying to read the card after their shift left,” Hagerman said.
The system at the new office in Straban Township was met with excitement for reasons like this.
There are 15 phone lines on every dispatcher’s computer and every call isn’t an emergency, but they answer them all with speed and courtesy. The county is looking at a plan to keep four dispatchers on phones 24-7. Now there’s four dispatchers on only during certain hours on weekdays.
There are always at least two dispatchers on duty. There’s always one fire dispatcher and one police dispatcher. While any dispatcher can answer any call, they only handle the type of calls they’re assigned to.
Additional dispatchers handle police calls because they make up the majority of calls. Any dispatcher can handle 911 calls, but when they get through the call, they may have to go to another dispatcher to send out an ambulance or police officer.
The offices where the dispatchers work are kept dimly lit.
Donna Powers, 911 coordinator, said a study showed keeping the lights low reduces stress levels.
“When you have the lights up you can feel the tension in your chest,” she said.
The only tension in the office is on the telephone, but dispatchers like it that way because they can escape it after work.
Hagerman and his co-workers often meet up outside of the office. Last baseball season, they went to games in Baltimore, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. Shenk and dispatcher Gary Bretzman often go hunting together.
“We always pick on each other,” Hagerman said. “It makes it nice.”
Experience in emergency services is almost required to work as a dispatcher.
“Ninety percent of us that work here have a fire or police background,” said Ben Parr, a dispatch trainee and fire company lieutenant.
Three fire chiefs, an EMS captain, one assistant fire chief and a chief of police all answer calls for the county 911 service.
Not only does working as a dispatcher require understanding how to respond to trouble quickly and calmly, it requires endurance. Dispatchers work six 12-hour days.
However, they do get a day off in the middle of the work week and several days in a row off afterward. In the end, it all works out to 40-hour work weeks.