A calm voice in the chaos

WINCHESTER, VA — A lot of people hear Elizabeth Yost’s voice but may not ever meet her. She was one of five people in the state to win a 9-1-1 Medal of Honor this year from the state chapter of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials for helping one of those people.

A dispatcher for the city for the past six years, Yost, 25, took what she thought would be a routine call on July 29, but she quickly realized it would be slightly more difficult than most. A small child’s voice came through to her headset, and she couldn’t trace the call like she normally can quickly do because it was coming from an unactivated cell phone.

The girl couldn’t have been more than 6 years old, Yost said, and she told Yost that her father was hurting her mother.

“She was all right,” Yost said, reflecting on the child’s surprising lack of fear. “Toward the end of the call, we just kind of talked to calm her down.”

But first, she had to figure out where the call was coming from.

The child didn’t know her full address, and Yost attempted several methods to figure it out. She asked for her parents’ full names to no avail. Then she asked the caller to find a piece of mail with an address written on it, but no such luck.

Finally, Yost asked the child whether police had been to her house before, and she said yes. She inquired about the color of the uniforms the officers wore, and the child remembered that they were brown. From that information, Yost determined that Frederick County sheriffs deputies must have been the previous visitors, and she was able to get them on their way to the residence.

Yost said she was surprised when she heard that she had won the medal, which she keeps in her dark office, brightened only by the flickers of at least a dozen computer screens. She didn’t even know Erin Elrod, the Emergency Communications Center director, had nominated her.

To the untrained person, the office seems chaotic — three different dispatchers talking at once, seeming to speak in their own language, designed for clarity and efficiency.

But Yost doesn’t want any other job.

“I didn’t really have anything in particular that I wanted to do after high school, but now I can’t picture anything else,” she said. “It’s fun going to work and not [doing] the same thing every day. Some days you go in there and you don’t have hardly anything all day, and some days you’re [taking] calls and dispatching PD to things left and right. It just depends.”

Sometimes the office could receive more than 100 calls in one 10-hour shift, but sometimes only a few.

“If an accident happens, everybody calls about one accident,” Yost said. “You might get 20 calls on one accident.”

Yost delved into emergency communications only a year out of high school, but had a long road ahead of her.

In addition to attending the dispatching portion of the police academy in Middletown for a week, she had to officially train for almost a year.

“You still train every day, really,” she said. “You learn new stuff every day.”

Born and raised in the Winchester area, Yost graduated from John Handley High School and has no intention of moving away from the Winchester area. She said she only lives in Berkeley Springs, W.Va., because her husband, city firefighter Chris Yost, dragged her there.

As for the child she helped in July, Yost doesn’t know her name or what happened to her mother. But that child is part of the reason why Yost loves being a dispatcher, “the fact that you’re making a difference [to] somebody,” she said.

Read the story here.

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