LEESVILLE, LA — Emergency dispatchers live lives of extreme. A day at work can be a long, monotonous 12 hours with nothing to break the sameness except for emergency calls, sometimes spaced few and far between, that aren’t really emergencies.

However, when something does happen, chances are it’s not something good.

Kay Cooley, supervisor of Vernon Parish Communications District E-911 and also a dispatcher, remembers the worst call she ever received wasn’t even from a Vernon Parish resident.

“I could hear the bones” cracking, said Cooley of the domestic abuse call the 15-year veteran dispatcher answered from Allen Parish that day.

Depending on the weather, cell towers can ping calls to the Vernon Parish E-911 from as far away as Texas, which can cause complications when you’re trying to dispatch emergency aid in the most efficient way possible.

In this particular case, the call came in from the victim’s mother-in-law.

Fall out from the job includes never knowing how things are resolved, unless of course, the situation makes the news.
For Kalen Gould, whose been working at the district for three years, the worst call she remembers involved the drowning of a toddler at Kisatchie.

But not all calls are tragedies or even emergencies in the strictest sense. Liz Twyman, secretary/dispatcher whose been at the job in Vernon Parish for 10 years, remembers one call from Fort Polk from a woman in desperate situation.

“I just want to let you know I’m locked in my bathroom, and I can’t get out,” Twyman remembers the woman saying.

As she dispatched the fire department to the woman’s house, Twyman empathized with the caller: “At least you had your phone with you.”

One of the most frustrating parts of their job, said Cooley, is fielding calls from children who are playing on the phone, especially old cell phones. If the battery is still in it, even if it’s dead, anyone can still call 911 on a cell phone.

The dispatchers receive about five of those a day. Cooley remembers receiving 30 calls from the same child in one day.

Suicides, murders and tragedies are part of the job, and the dispatchers have their own ways of dealing with those stressful situations. Perhaps one way they all deal with it is to take life’s funny moments as they come.

Sometimes children “accidentally” calling 911 are just the thing to lighten the air. Gould says one boy asked her out on a date after a conversation about Elmo.

“It was a great conversation,” said Gould.

Other lighter moments include the pocket-dialed 911 calls.

“I love when they sing,” said Gould, of the callers who unknowingly press the right number combination as they go about their day. Sometimes its singing, other times it’s normal conversation. Cooley remembers one in which a father gave his son the talk about the birds and the bees.

The busiest times any of the dispatchers can remember was during Hurricane Rita and last year’s water outage in Leesville on Christmas Eve, the latter of which was not really an emergency with which the dispatchers could deal.

But that didn’t stop the callers, who clearly saw that needing to cook a huge Christmas meal without any water was an emergency of the grandest proportions, said Gould.

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