Ky. 9-1-1 Dispatcher Tracked Calls with Time Clock
March 30--Kathy Taylor found her calling as a McLean County 911 dispatcher.
But after spending 22 years as a vital link between life and death, Taylor, 58, retired on March 1, making her the last of the first four original dispatchers.
"When I started, we had one desk, we had the 911 phone, the courthouse phone and a radio," said Taylor, who began 911 dispatching in 1993. "...And when someone called us, all we had was their phone number. They had to tell us where they lived."
It was also a time before computer-aided 911 dispatching became the standard and before cellphones allowed for immediate emergency calls.
In the early years, Taylor said the 911 system was based around color-coded cards -- blue was for police, red was for ambulance and yellow was for the fire department.
"As soon as a call came in, you had to hit the timeclock when you received it, hit again when you dispatched and then when everybody started going on-scene," she said.
Training for full-time 911 dispatchers was also limited in the beginning.
Taylor was only required one week of training, but now any new full-time 911 dispatchers must first go through polygraph and drug testing phases before spending five and a half weeks of training at the police academy in Richmond. However, all dispatchers -- no matter their length of service -- must have ongoing training hours to remain certified.
Despite loving her job, Taylor said the introduction of computer-aided 911 dispatching in 1998 was a significant challenge for her.
"I almost quit my job," she said. "To be honest with you, I was a little scared of computers. But l learned that computers sometimes couldn't keep up with us. They do hold a lot more information and they made the dispatching part easier. We've gone from minutes to now just seconds."
Taylor held on and she was eventually promoted as the 911 supervisor in 2007.
Though Taylor was trained to be calm no matter the emergency, she said it was difficult not knowing how the emergency call was playing out.
"The hardest part about the job is sitting there and not knowing what's going on," she said. "You know that there's a bad situation and you've got the (first responders) there but you're not there. You're having to just wait, do your status checks and hope everything is OK."
She added that being a 911 dispatcher is an often "thankless job."
"When people put 'thank yous' in the paper, they don't always mention the dispatcher," Taylor said. "They'll thank the firemen for coming to put out the house fire or the ambulance for saving Grandma or the police officer for getting the bad guy. But they never thank the person who they called before they got all of these other people."
The McLean County 911 Center is under the authority of the sheriff's department.
Sheriff Ken Frizzell said Taylor's replacement for supervisor has yet to be determined.
"Myself and Deputy Butch Garst are working with the 911 Center during this transitional period," Frizzell said. "We're in the middle of making some decisions and we don't want to make them hastily."
Taylor said she didn't want to stop being a 911 dispatcher but health reasons forced her into retirement.
"It's been a great job and I do miss it," said Taylor who expressed gratitude to county officials and emergency personnel. "I told them if they needed any help to just call me."
Copyright 2015 - Messenger-Inquirer, Owensboro, Ky.
