Crime & Safety

"9-1-1, What Is Your Emergency?"

A look inside the Ledyard Dispatch Center.

The myth is that they only answer phones.

The reality is that picking up that ringing 911 line — or the non-emergency police department line — is just the first step in a long list of responsibilities, procedures, duties and actions that a emergency dispatcher may end up executing. And because the ring of the phone sounds the same no matter what the emergency is on the other end, they never know what that call will entail.

It is that mystery on the other end of the line that makes the job a good one, says Ruby York, a 45-year-old dispatcher with 14 years experience in the Ledyard call center. She works primarily the day shift and is also a firefighter in Preston and an EMT.

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Read More: Rodolico On Dispatch Issue: 'I Have To Look At What's Best For The Town'

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“Once you get in the swing of emergency services, it’s hard to get out,” she explains.

Her colleague on the day Patch visited the center, 21-year-old Nick Bozym, a part-time dispatcher and professional firefighter in Middletown, agreed: “I never wanted to sit behind a desk, but lo and behold, here I am, sitting behind a desk. But it’s not (boring). Because here you have to give all of your focus to everything.”

In the 30 days between May 27 and June 27 of this year, the Ledyard emergency dispatch center received 1,074 calls that required some type of action, ranging from dispatching an officer to something as routine as an abandoned car to something as involved as a fatal car accident. That number does not count the calls that required no action.

During Hurricane Sandy, the dispatch center was averaging 25 calls a minute, York says. In the first four days of the storm, dispatch received 313 calls that required some sort of action, on top of the calls that required no action. And during the blizzard in February, when calls were pouring in about stranded cars, snowbound residents, closed roads, and downed wires, there was a house fire that fire trucks had great difficulty getting to because of the snow.

The dispatch center, which is housed in the police department on Lorenz Parkway, is staffed 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Currently the town is considering a proposal to outsource the dispatch center. While the exact costs of running the dispatch center have not been broken down publicly, the group charged with investigating the options for the town determined that outsourcing the dispatch to Groton Town would be the least costly, and keeping the service in Ledyard would be the most costly, but would be “operationally” best.

Currently the center employs six full time and eight part time dispatchers. The six full-time dispatchers are members of the municipal unions. They work three shifts, 8 a.m.-4 p.m.; 4 p.m.-midnight; and midnight to 8 a.m., seven days a week. They dispatch Ledyard fire, Gales Ferry fire, Ledyard ambulance, and, for the town of Preston, Poquetanuck fire and Preston City fire. They also take 911 calls for Ledyard and Preston, and any other community that a call bounces in off a tower. If the 911 call is for Ledyard police, it is transferred to State Police Troop E barracks for the official dispatch.

But it is more than just answering and transferring. Once, York talked a woman through resuscitating her newborn baby, which she had just delivered into a toilet at her house. Another time, she helped state police locate a woman who had been kidnapped, and was calling 911 from the trunk of the car where she was being held. And then there was the time Bozym took a call from a 2-year-old whose parent was having a diabetic emergency, and he had to coax enough information out of the child to be able to send the police and ambulance.

And York still thinks about that day last February, when the Stonington grandmother kidnapped her two baby grandsons from their daycare center in North Stonington and the entire region was gripped for hours in the Amber Alert before the three were found dead at the Lake of Isles boat launch, victims of a murder-suicide.

“We had been looking for the car all day, there was the BOLO and the Amber Alert, and then that first 911 call came in here (about the bodies) and I knew right where they were. I got our officers out there right away. It was so frustrating, she drove right through town. You go home and you say ‘What if there was something I could’ve done?’.”

“You have to have the same mindset whether you are answering the call or on the scene,” Bozym says. “You are the first one. You put a picture in your mind based on the information you are getting, and then you make a decision what needs to be done.”

The dispatch center is set to accommodate two people, with two phone banks, two rows of computer screens and keyboards, and two sets of all protocols. In addition to answering 911 and the Ledyard non-emergency line (“I’m sorry, sir, you can’t burn brush today,” York tells one caller. “It’s cloudy.”) they also man the window where the public comes in to the police station. The police department does fingerprinting and takes gun permit applications from the public.

They run computer searches and warrant checks for officers in the field, monitor alarm systems in town, triage situations to determine what level of emergency it is, and who needs to be dispatched to help.

“You have to be good at multi-tasking,” Bozym says, “and you have to work well under pressure because you’re it. On the scene, there are others. Here, you’re it.”

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