UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Wednesday, January 25. 1995
5A
Dispatchers put fears to rest
By Teresa Veazey Kansan staff writer
Nobody ever calls Bonnie Brahler to tell her good things — only bad things.
Yumi Chikamori / KANSAN
Jackie Jepson, a communications officer for the Douglas County Dispatch Center, answers a non-emergency 911 call at the center.
"I told him we're on our way," she said.
Just two weeks ago, a boy called to tell her that his mommy was suicidal. "Mommy" was attempting to asphyxiate herself with her car's carbon monoxide fumes.
Brahler, a Douglas County communications officer, answers calls in the dispatch office of the Douglas County Law Enforcement Center.
Brahler, a dispatcher for seven years, doesn't need to imagine what the calls will be like. The surprises have become routine.
"Every day, you answer calls from people with different stories but the same problems," she said. "You learn not to anticipate anything."
Some calls turn out to be bigger than imagined, said Jim O'Connell, who has been a dispatcher for almost 20 years.
"The biggest thing Iremember was a train wreck," he said. "It was 1979 at about 6 o'clock in the morning. A person called in and said, 'I'm not sure, but I think there's a train wreck."
The caller was right. A train passing through Lawrence had derailed, scattering train parts and injuring passengers.
"That was my first experience with disaster," O'Connell said. "In that kind of a situation, you don't have time to think, only time to react."
Jim Gillihan has been a dispatcher for 29 years. Despite the thousands of calls he's handled, he still gets tense when officers are called out to a potentially dangerous situation.
"It makes you feel for the officers getting shot at," he said. "I wouldn't want to go out on the streets today."
When Brahler asks for a caller's name, she usually has trouble getting a response.
Dispatchers have to ask a lot of questions. But they often don't get answers.
"Nobody wants to get involved anymore." Brahler said.
During one shift, Brahler received several calls from a Lawrence apartment complex. Most of the callers complained about screams they had heard from a group of people standing near a pool at the complex.
"Nobody went down to the pool to see what was going on, and there was a dead guy at the bottom of the pool," she said. "It can be dangerous to get involved."
But sometimes people go out of their way to help. Brahler said.
"There was a jogger out jogging who was hit by a car, and the person who hit him put him in the car and drove him to the hospital," she said. "How many times do you see that — a person hitting somebody and then driving them to the hospital? We get more
calls on a dog that has been hit by a car than if a person gets hit by a car.
Brahler put her disgust on hold to answer a call. An irate caller wanted to complain about a group of children on bicycles making noise near his house. Brahler asked how many children he thought were making noise. The caller paused.
"Seven thousand." he said.
Communications officer Jackie Jepson knows that most calls deal with the tragedies of everyday life. But the job can be rewarding, she said.
"You're almost like a mother sometimes, reaching out to people and putting their fears to rest," she said. "You take authority and tell them that help is on the way."
For Jepson, helping callers makes the job worthwhile.
"You don't realize how many problems there are until you're a dispatcher," Jepson said. "It's one thing to read about something in the paper. It's another to talk to the people involved in it."
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