The other side of an emergency

Because the San Mateo County Public Safety Dispatch Center provides police dispatch service for the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office and several other Peninsula cities as well as all of the fire departments and emergency medical first responders in the county, a good portion of those calls — more than 400 in the early afternoon — were answered by county dispatchers.

Tucked away in the basement of the Hall of Justice in Redwood City, the lighting in the center is often dimmed to allow the dispatchers inside to more easily view the six or seven screens in front of them. Dings indicating incoming calls interrupt the relative calm that settles in when calls die down, a far cry from the state of the center April 3 when questions about the San Bruno shooting flooded the lines.

After decades of experience with emergency response, Dan Belville, the dispatch center’s director, said he could tell right away the volume of calls coming in the afternoon of April 3 was going to warrant an all-hands-on-deck kind of response.

“When I walked into the center having been in public safety for many, many years, I said this is the real deal,” the former San Mateo fire chief said. “Phones were absolutely ringing off the hook, every seat was filled.”

When a spillover room for call takers was filled, Belville said space was cleared in the County Manager’s Office to manage the stream of calls as well as coordinate a mutual aid response among the county’s police agencies. Though large events like the shooting incident at the YouTube campus are not common, Belville said they can often highlight the rising demand for those capable of fielding 911 calls.

With a steadily increasing county population and more and more employees commuting into the county for work, the center responded to just under 400,000 calls last year, with many more repeat or misdialed calls coming into the center, explained Belville.

Traffic accidents, suicides, homicides and large events like the Pacific Gas and Electric pipeline explosion in 2010 and the Asiana Airlines airplane crash at the San Francisco Airport in 2013 constitute the more dramatic events the dispatch center has dealt with, but countless calls reporting stray dogs, medical emergencies and disturbances of all shapes and sizes are also included among the array of situations to which dispatchers respond.

“The growth I think we’re seeing in the county is in part the cause for some of our increase in volume because there’s just more activity and we have to deal with that,” he said.

In an effort to meet the rising tide of calls, Belville and Sue Anderson, assistant director of the center, are on a mission to recruit new staff members. Because radio dispatchers are trained to take calls as well as dispatch fire, police and medical responders, they must go through hundreds of hours of training and on-the-job experience, explained Anderson.

By creating a call taker position, which primarily deals with incoming calls and does not include the responsibility of dispatching emergency units, Anderson said the center will be better equipped to handle periods of high call volume because dispatchers won’t be pulled away from sending a unit to a scene to answer an incoming call as many times as they would with fewer hands.

Anderson acknowledged the demands of those who work at the center are many, adding their rigorous training and dozens of protocol help dispatchers and call takers quickly and calmly identify next steps for those calling with distressing situations. Detailed steps for what to do in instances of someone choking, women about to give birth and heart attacks are at the ready on a computerized system so dispatchers can deliver what can be life-saving instructions, said Anderson.

But the detailed steps don’t make the job any less taxing, said Anderson, who added many discover constantly multi-tasking and riding the wave of calls on the 12-hour shifts that come with the job is more stressful than they expected when they started.

“You have to be an adrenaline junkie,” she said. “You have to take the highs and lows.”

With more than 36 years of experience in dispatch, Anderson said many are drawn to the field despite its demand out of a desire to give back to the community, adding that dispatchers are considered the “first” first responder because they are often the first emergency responder a caller faces.

“Being that first first responder, we truly at this level can make a huge difference,” she said.

With some 60 dispatchers and call takers on board this year, Belville and Anderson are hoping to hire another 15 in three academies the center is operating in the coming months to improve their responses. Also expected to help handle the call volume, a new Public Safety Regional Operations Center is currently under construction and is expected to be equipped with updated computer-aided dispatch and geographic information systems when it opens in the spring of 2019, said Anderson.

In the meantime, Belville is looking forward to bolstering his staff, which has taken on police dispatch for an increasing number of cities in recent years — which now include Broadmoor Village, Daly City, East Palo Alto, Half Moon Bay, Millbrae, Portola Valley, San Carlos, Woodside and the unincorporated sections of San Mateo County — without much of any additions to his current team.

Though the high demand for new staff weighs heavily on Belville, he noted the shortage of public safety personnel is a regional phenomenon and the fortuitous timing of projects like the new operations center as well as the new positions he’s been able to create.

“It’s like we can’t fill it fast enough,” he said. “We think it’s tough, but we think we’re balancing that need.”

anna@smdailyjournal.com

(650) 344-5200 ext. 106