By RICK ARMON
Akron Beacon Journal
Jeannie Kinback’s house is just like anybody else’s - sort of.
It has bedrooms. A living room. A kitchen and bathrooms.
But then there’s the emergency dispatching center located in her dining room - a fully functional dispatching center plopped right next to her table.
The setup includes a red phone with a special ring, Caller ID and a two-way radio to link with area fire departments and the local ambulance service - plus the ability to fire up the community’s tornado sirens.
Every four days, Kinback, 52, a veteran dispatcher with Valley Communications, is stationed there. Or perhaps she’s doing laundry. Or preparing dinner. Or sleeping. But wherever she is in the house or whatever she’s doing, she’s ready to answer a call for help.
With today’s state-of-the-art regional communications centers, such an arrangement may seem odd. But in rural Sandy Township it’s tradition that dispatchers - there are four of them - work out of the comfort of their own homes. It’s been that way for as long as anybody can remember, back to the days when firefighters’ wives were volunteer dispatchers.
And as far as local authorities are concerned, their unusual system - they don’t know of another one like it in the area - operates just fine so there’s no reason to change it.
“It works great for us,’' says Jim Herstine, chief of Quad Ambulance and supervisor of the service.
Anonymous heroes
Dispatchers everywhere are anonymous heroes: The calm voice, merely a voice, on the other end of the line making sure help arrives. But the four Valley Communications workers - Kinback, Sharmi Flott, Lisa Vissoc and Merrie McBride - go beyond that, inviting their work home and exposing their families to the tense and sometimes annoying world of dispatching. There’s no invisible barrier between professional and personal lives. They are one and the same.
But the dispatchers, who handle calls for Quad Ambulance and Sandy Township, Magnolia, Robertsville and Waynesburg fire departments, revel in the freedom they have working from home and in their ability to serve their community. Folks know their names and faces - or at least their voices.
They are so invested in the job that they often use their own private phones during crises, and have served as baby sitters for emergency workers out on calls and even victims’ children who had nowhere else to go.
Clearly they aren’t in it for the money. They get $450 a month, with no paid vacation.
They work 24-hour shifts every four days - 5 a.m. to 5 a.m, stuck within earshot of the red phone. Not until their shift ends are they free to go out.
Kinback, Flott, Vissoc and McBride, though, say it’s not too bad being cooped up. Indeed, it’s quite handy when you’re raising children or need to do some cleaning.
“We get a lot done at the house when we’re on duty,’' admits Flott, 42, who’s been dispatching from home for 14 years.
But then there’s the emergency phone. It always rings - to the tune of more than 1,000 emergencies a year. And that doesn’t include the nonemergency calls.
Sitting down to dinner? Brrr-ring. Sleeping soundly? Brrr-ring. Using the bathroom? Brrr-ring. Not your shift? Brrr-ring.
Flott’s first call came when she was in the shower. And Kinback admits showing up to “work’’ sick. (“You throw up in the bucket and then answer the radio,’' she explains.) And all have worked in their jammies.
“You really have to love to do this to get up in the middle of the night,’' McBride, 39, says.
Always ready
Since the phone rings in all their homes, the dispatchers answer it after the fourth ring even if not on duty - just in case something happened to the one who is. Backup batteries make sure they stay connected even if power goes out at their homes.
“When we’re on duty at home on our 24-hour shift, we’re responsible for that phone,’' says Vissoc, 45, who grew up with a fire phone in her house because her father was a fire chief and her mother was a dispatcher. “But the days that we’re not on, we still hear that fire phone ring seven days a week.... Our families never get a break.’'
Family members learn to live with the ring as well as the occasional quick sprints to the phone.
“Half the time I don’t even hear it,’' says Kenney Kinback, Jeannie’s husband. “You get used to it after a few years. It’d be kind of lonely without it.’'
Some confusion is inevitable: All the dispatchers have picked up their private phones and mistakenly said: ``Emergency services.’' Or grabbed the red phone and said: ``Hello’’ like they were answering a call from a relative.
McBride admits once answering the emergency line with a simple “Hello’’ and when the caller asked if he had reached the Waynesburg Police Department (when they were dispatching for the agency), she responded ``No’’ and hung up. Then she realized her mistake.
When the caller rang right back, she answered as if nothing happened, hoping he didn’t recognize her voice.
They have favorite emergency stories, as all dispatchers do. When a child fell down a well. When a man set himself on fire. When a boy got his head stuck in a home elevator.
The days of dispatching from home in Sandy Township, though, may be on the wane.
It’s not that the community wants a change, but money might dictate it. With five dispatching centers (there’s one at the Waynesburg Fire Department), it can get expensive when equipment needs to be updated.
Herstine says someday a central communications center will become a reality.
But for now, home dispatching will continue, especially because the dispatchers enjoy it.
“Nobody else in the world can give the community this service,’' Flott says.