A Night on the Job at the 9-1-1 Call Center

June 08--On a Monday night, just after sunset, streetlights cast West 13th Street in yellow. There are no cars, no people coming and going from the Clark County jail nearby, save for the occasional cop. Televisions are on inside the Dragonfly Cafe at the Clark County Public Service Center, but no one's around to watch them.

Out here, the loudest sound is the hum of a building that never goes quiet -- the Clark Regional Emergency Services Agency.

The lights are dim inside the dispatch center as operator Cassandra Deering settles into her chair for her late-night shift.

The 36-year-old clips on her headset and adjusts her six computer monitors, the glow from the screens reflecting off her glasses. Colored numbers on the digital wall clock read 21:00:00 in military time. It's 9 p.m. As most of Clark County winds down for the night, she's gearing up for the calls that come into 9-1-1 after dark.

The phone line rings and lights up, signaling her first call of the night.

"9-1-1, how can I help you?" she asks.

Her shift starts with a medical call -- these make up the bulk of the emergencies that are dispatched to fire departments. Cassandra moves through a script of questions to get a better idea of what's wrong with the patient, a woman in a group home. Cassandra's voice is calm, cool. As she talks, her fingers flit across her keyboard, relaying information to the responding medics.

Around the room, other operators are taking 9-1-1 calls and dispatching emergency personnel. The conversations overlap, creating a cacophony of police codes, tones and voices laced with radio crackle.

"Ma'am ... ma'am, I need you to calm down. OK?" Cassandra's coworker says. She's taking a call about a fight. "I understand, and I'm going to help you, but I need you to calm down and stop yelling."

It can get stressful here.

Cassandra sends medics to the group home. For most medical calls, she never learns how they turn out. Her job is to figure out the problem, send the closest emergency units and hope for the best. There's no time to dwell on it or feel bad.

"We're so used to being strong for the public," Cassandra said. "We can't break down, because if we break down someone could get hurt or die."

Still, every dispatcher has their moment.

Cassandra's happened her first year, when she had to be sent home and talk to a counselor after a particularly difficult call regarding a man who took his own life. His wife called 9-1-1 and recited a suicide note that she found.

"I continued to take the call, but I was bawling," Cassandra said.

She hasn't had a tough call like that in a while.

About 9:40 p.m., a woman calls 9-1-1, saying she thinks her brother is doing drugs in the house across the street. She saw him go into the house three hours prior.

"What types of drugs is he on?" Cassandra asks. Some drugs hype a person up, while others sedate.

Cassandra searches for the man's records, and finds several red flags. He has several warrants out for his arrest and he's punched an officer before.

"It's not just going to be one or two units. We'll probably send more than that," she said. "When the officers go there, they're going to use more caution, because he's probably going to try to resist or take off."

A map on her computer shows patrol cars en route to the call, along with the locations of other ambulances, police and fire engines responding to calls throughout the county. She never realized just how big Clark County is until she took this job. When she checks the map again, patrol cars are parked around the house.

The officers don't know if the man is still inside the house, but they have to be extra cautious. They don't want to get hurt.

After 10 years dispatching 9-1-1 calls, Cassandra knows anything can happen anytime, anywhere.

"People think cause they live maybe in a nicer neighborhood that it's safer. It just depends. You just get different types of crimes," Cassandra said. "We've had situations where it was a so-called nice area and that's where the murder happened down the street ... or, somebody has a meth lab that nobody knows about, but it's in a nice area. I don't believe there are any nice areas anymore."

Perhaps, she says, she's become desensitized to the bad, hearing about it all night. She's used to taking a call and quickly moving onto the next. With her family and friends, she makes a conscious effort to slow down and be more sympathetic.

Police are tied up on the city's west side when a man calls, worried about people who are cussing at him in a parking lot. There's always something going on, whether it's an emergency or not. Still, Cassandra acknowledges, to the person calling 9-1-1, it is an emergency. It's their emergency.

"You just never know what someone's going through, especially when they're calling for help -- how desperate they are," Cassandra says. "It's a humbling experience."

And the watchdog residents who call about something that doesn't look right, she said, are trying to keep the neighborhoods in good shape. A man calls 9-1-1 to report that someone appears to be stealing metal from a construction site near a Dairy Queen. She lauds people's good intentions, even if the calls turn out to be nothing.

"We get all types of people who call in," she said. "A lot of people just want to chat for a second, kind of be validated, dignified for a second, and then they're fine."

She gets calls from lonely people who want to talk; parents seeking help disciplining their kids; and people with mental illness making a cry for help when they haven't taken their meds.

When it's quiet, she talks with them for a while. Otherwise -- with calls in the queue -- she points them to resources and tells them she has to let them go.

CRESA never stops collecting information about the emergencies and non-emergencies that come into 9-1-1. All of the calls are recorded 24 hours a day, every day of the week.

Deering knows this all too well. A couple years ago, she went home around midnight for her break. As she was leaving her house, she saw the bushes rustling near her house and believed there was someone hiding there. She screamed and ran back into her house, where she called her coworkers at 9-1-1. The imagined psychopath in the bushes turned out to be a group of possums.

"I've never been able to live that down. They tease me about it still to this day," Cassandra said. "They saved the recording and kept playing it over and over again."

But, that's part of the mentality she's built as a dispatcher.

She finds herself getting descriptions and reading license plates; she knows what her coworkers want to know. Though she's not paranoid like she was when she first started out, she says she's more aware of her surroundings.

"That's the part of the dispatcher that never really sleeps," she says.

Cassandra sits up, scanning the map of emergency vehicles sprinkled throughout the county. There's a lull in the radio activity as her shift approaches the midnight hour.

Copyright 2014 - The Columbian, Vancouver, Wash.