New your dispatchers

[Chewy911]

NEW YORK DISPATCHER
Just curious on how you guys/gals handle so many calls. I read that in the snow storm of December there were several priority 1 calls that were pending for hours. How is a call load of something such as 9/11 handled? Do people sit on hold waiting for a dispatcher to answer? OR.......Do you guys really have something like an automated 911 answering system.???? Or if anyone else has heard of such a thing please elaborate. How many dispatcher and call takers do you have? How many "fire mains" or channels do you operate? Were I work at we only have 3 call takers/dispatchers. We do both. And handle around 250k calls a year. And I think if I read correctly New York processed that many in about the first two hours of 9/11. I’m just fascinated with the about of calls like that, and how the centers handle them. Thanks for listening

[Bostondude]

I can't even fathom that kind of call volume. My base is small so we do not get a lot of calls. I work the overnight and sometimes I go 3-4 nights without an emergency response on the base or a mutual. It is just 1 dispatcher during the day and at night although there is a supervisor that works alongside the day dispatcher. If something major happened, I would just call for alarm room assistance over the P.A. and somebody would come help me take calls if i suddenly got flooded.

[Brick3633]

Chewy, they prolly handle it just as I do everyday...wake up in the morning, **** excellence, have a good breakfast, come to work..and pretty much just be 100% pure american badass..thats pretty much all you gotta do

[pasobuff]

On a day such as 9-11, what we (Westchester County) did was prioritize calls - also had extra dispatchers called in and the duties were split up - certain ones handled NYC, others handled the Westchester calls.....

I was working one day when a suspected tornado went through a heavily populated township - what we did then was I handled the calls for that district, the other dispatchers handled the rest of the County.....at one point I remember I was contacting the Chief with what I had pending to find out who to send, as all apparatus was out on calls...with mutual aid already working.....

Now when I was a PD dispatcher, it wasn't uncommon to have 2 dispatchers working, actually 1 dispatcher and one switchboard operator.....when things got hairy - like during a snowstorm - we did the best we could and again, prioritized the calls.....calling in local backup if needed.

[Chewy911]

Sorry guys I’ve been out of the country for a couple of days. But yes I could not imagine how a center could handle that amount of calls. I don’t think the electronics would be able to handle it. Ours would prolly just melt down in the back room. And ****brick I know exactly where your coming from on that! When I get down in the bathroom of a mornings my toilet thanks me for make his day a little better