Larkins guided the woman through the steps of CPR while dispatching emergency responders.

She never found out if the man survived.

The call rattled her.

“That call always stuck with me,” she said last week.

Larkins, of Edmonds, is an emergency dispatcher at the South Snohomish County Communications Agency, better known as SNOCOM, in Mountlake Terrace.

The phone calls can be tough to shake off. And it’s rare to have closure.

There’s a balance dispatchers achieve between caring about the strangers on the phone who need help and staying detached and professional.

“At first that was hard, but you learn to pick up and keep going,” Larkins said.

It helps having a strong support system of coworkers who understand how Larkins, 30, feels. The common language dispatchers use at work — and down time used to decompress — also help them stay poised.

“There’s great teamwork and everyone helps each other out,” she said.

She joined SNOCOM two years ago. It was a natural fit as Larkins enjoys helping others.

“It’s an exciting job; it’s never the same every day,” she said.

SNOCOM is a consolidated emergency public safety dispatch agency created more than 40 years ago by its founding partners: the cities of Brier, Edmonds, Lynnwood, Mountlake Terrace and Woodway along with Snohomish County Fire Protection District 1 and the Snohomish County Sheriff’s Office.

Larkins’ work includes on-the-job training and monthly in-service training. Last fall, Larkins attended training to improve the survival rate of patients who have gone into cardiac arrest. Larkins said she’s constantly learning something new and refreshing already-learned skills.

She works six days on and three days off while rotating through three positions for which she’s been cross-trained and certified: fire, police and call-taking dispatch. Larkins also trains new dispatchers.

When emotionally charged calls come in, Larkins said, her instincts take over and her training kicks in, including techniques to help callers calm down and to provide information for responders.

One misconception about dispatchers is they’re rude and don’t care, Larkins said.

“That’s not true; we care,” she said.

Part of the job requires asking a series of questions to get information to aid responders, as the caller is the dispatcher’s eyes and ears. This can come off as insensitive to callers.

“No. 1 is we’re customer-service oriented,” she said. “We’re more than just ‘get information and get off the phone’.”

It helps to have a sense of humor and a good attitude and to leave what happened at work at the dispatch center.

“You have to know you did the best job you could,” she said.

And it helps to know when to let go.

“I can’t control what other people do, but I can control how I react,” she said.

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They are multi-taskers who can react quickly in an emergency situation, then go minutes or hours without even a phone call.

McCurties and Plamondon are two of the 10 county dispatchers, who provide 24-7 service 365 days a year.

“Every day is different,” Plamondon said. “You never know what’s going to happen.

“You have to be able to do more than one thing at a time. It is stressful, but every job can be. Sometimes it’s a challenge. But I love it because I’m able to help so many people in the community.”

McCurties and Plamondon, the most veteran of county dispatchers, both started out working for the Sheriff’s Department when it was in Leland. They have seen major technology changes, going from a typewritten or handwritten complaint to a modernized computer and mapping system.

“You have to be computer savvy,” Plamondon said.

The county has three dispatch stations; two are always manned. Each dispatcher has a desktop with four different computers. The Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) tracks personnel, equipment, reports, addresses, phone information, mapping and more.

McCurties, who also worked for a decade dispatching in Detroit, remembers when cell phone calls were non-existent.

“The technology has changed and continues to evolve,” she said. “We didn’t have CAD.”

In 2010, the dispatchers handled 6,883 9-1-1 calls and 39,613 non-emergency calls that resulted in over 12,000 incidents requiring that first responders be sent out. The numbers for 2011 are not yet available.

While only 15 percent of the calls received are 9-1-1 dialed, another 5,000 calls they take end up needing emergency personnel. They also received 137 9-1-1 hangups.

Dispatchers placed in excess of 100,000 additional outgoing calls to other agencies, departments or citizens.

“I think it’s a comfort to the caller when you get a real person,” McCurties said. “Especially when it’s your baby running a 106 temp or its your husband having a heart attack, or your kid that just fell off the boat in the middle of the lake.

“You’ve got two well-trained dispatchers to handle what pops up.”

The dispatchers have to sort through a lot of dribble at times. In 2010, they received 232 calls just for information. It’s their job to figure out if a real emergency is at hand.

“We encourage you to call 911 if you want a policeman, fire or ambulance person at your house,” Tom Skowronski, the county’s emergency services director. “We’ll sort it out.

“Don’t sit there and think in your mind is it an emergency? Should I dial 9-1-1”

“You learn to prioritize,” Plamondon said. “Sometimes you’ll get a 9-1-1 and a general call and they both want something but you have to say do you have an emergency.

“You learn to pick up on little hidden clues.”

The days shifts —7 a.m. to 3 p.m. — usually handle more administrative calls like acquiring police reports. Afternoon shifts — 3-11 p.m. — usually get a lot more in-progress calls such as family disputes and traffic stops.

Sometimes a day at work is hard to forget.

“It’s really hard sometimes to leave work at work as it is to leave home at home,” Plamondon said. “But you find a way to cope with it and move on.

“But there are some calls that will stick with you forever.”

One of those calls came on March 30, 2006, when the Orchard Creek Health Care facility caught fire.

“It was probably the most stressful day of work because you had to find placements for the patients that they had and there was a lot going on,” Plamondon recalled.

Calls that have anything to do with kids also stick with Plamondon, who has a daughter.

“Those calls get you right in the heart strings, especially for a parent,” she said.

Handling deaths in families is a difficult call for McCurties.

“Sometimes the person is calling on behalf of spouse drowning or a husband who died of cancer,” McCurties said. “People are just so emotionally charged.

“You have to learn to keep your own equilibrium and it’s hard because you know within seconds when you have a difficult call and there’s a temptation to raise up your adrenalin, too.”

Plamondon said her biggest professional reward came in November when an Interlochen hunter publicly thanked her for help in rescue efforts after he fell from a tree stand in the Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore.

“He wrote a letter to the editor … that was huge,” she said. “Usually people thank the fire or the police departments.

“They never usually thank the person who they actually talk to and got everybody there. It’s one of the highlights.”

“We don’t get a lot of thanks, but the rewarding thing is knowing that you are able to meet the needs that people have when they are calling,” McCurties said.

Dispatchers, who are paid $16.21 per hour to start and top out at $21, go through 16 weeks of intensive training.

They don’t touch the radio or telephone for the first four to five weeks. They do not answer 9-1-1 calls until their communication training officer clears them.

Dispatchers report to Skowronski, a former Sheriff’s deputy and undersheriff. He has been a hands-off supervisor since the law enforcement center opened Nov. 11, 2004.

“They have policy and procedures in place to walk them through 99 percent of the stuff,” Skowronski said.

Leelanau’s dispatchers were one of the first to use emergency medical dispatch services program.

“A lot of the process is out of dispatcher’s hands,” Skowronski said. “When you call in, the dispatchers first responses is Leelanau 9-1-1, what is the address of you emergency.

“We need to get the address first and what number you are calling from. A lot of times it’s already on the screen. It’s just a matter of confirmation.”

The protocol guides dispatchers through a series of yes or no or short single answer questions.

“After a couple of questions, dispatchers will have enough information at this point to say, ‘Stay on the line. I’m going to going to dispatch some help to you,” he said. “It’s important that they stay on the line.”

With the push of a button, the appropriate first responder is contacted.

“The idea is to not send unnecessary resources to a call,” he said.

The county also dispatches for the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore Service and Michigan State Police.

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“It’s about 50-50 between land-line calls and cell phones in Upper Arlington,” said Colleen Shaw, a permanent part-time communications technician, or “comm tech.” While technology is pushing more and more users to mobile devices, the older nature of the community means the comm techs still get a lot of calls over land lines, Shaw said.

With the latter, a hard drive connected to the old phone can instantly mark the callers’ addresses, and alert the dispatchers to any previous situations that have occurred at the address, such as drug-related or domestic violence runs. That information can then be relayed to officers on the street before they approach the residence.

While on-duty officers patrol Upper Arlington’s streets, the dispatchers feed them a steady stream of warrant updates, calls from residents ranging from those in immediate danger to missing pets, while at the same time coordinating with the UA fire division and surrounding agencies.

Things weren’t always so high-tech in the police station, according to Patti Porter, a full-time UA comm tech who has been doing the job for 31 years.

“When I first came here our radio room wasn’t nearly this size,” Porter said. “The playback recorder was reel to reel, and only one person was on duty at all times, initially. We would do check-up calls every hour to make sure (patrolling officers) were OK.

“When the system would go down, we’d actually bring in a cruiser to the sally port, and we would have a runner going back and forth to the car’s radio. There were some interesting times.”

Porter said that today’s Arlington dispatchers have a variety of responsibilities besides taking 911 calls. They’re kept busy entering warrants into LEADS (a law enforcement records management system), tracking down information for the detective bureau, keeping data on the city’s Kind Call program, updating information on residents’ alarm systems, and dozens of other tasks to keep the division running smoothly.

But when the old phone rings, everything else stops, comm tech Brooke Worster said.

“You have to be a Type A personality, and you have to be pretty organized,” she said. “You have to have the ability to separate the situations. You might hear kids screaming, or parents screaming, while in your head you have your own children at home. But you have to be calming, to calm them down, and do your job by figuring out what help they need, and then getting them that help.”

All of those aspects make up a level of service that Arlington residents have come to expect, Porter said. As UA and other central Ohio cities continue to discuss regionalizing services to deal with losses in state funding, the nature of dispatching services may change.

“I think eventually it will have to (regionalize), not because they want to, but because resources are so expensive and limited, and they have to share to be able to afford them. It’s just the economic climate,” Porter said.

“That’s what scares me; not losing the personalized service so much as the service overall itself,” she said. “It’s a different experience when you’re talking about Columbus (emergency services), because what they deal with is quantity. When you merge, that’s what you’re dealing with, a lot more quantity of calls. I’m not grading Columbus by any means, because I know what they do and what they work with, but it’s a different experience.”

“What scares me though, when you talk about merging, because we do provide that level of service, if we combine with other agencies it’s probably going to go down,” Shaw said. “Realistically, you’re going to have less of the people who are digging for that needed information, the people who are saying, ‘Wait a minute, something’s not right here,’ and it just seems that the level of service would have to go down.”

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WARNER ROBINS, GA — Twelve cubicles are hugged together in a large room just off Carl Vinson Parkway. Each is labeled with a gold nameplate of a public safety agency and houses an operator calmly fielding several emergency dispatches before a collage of computer screens.

It’s the Houston County E-911 Center, and it has an imminent need for upgrades in that room and corresponding systems in emergency vehicles throughout the county and its three cities, commander Capt. Ricky Harlowe said.

VANCOUVER, BC, CANADA — It was a December night three years ago when the phone rang in the radio room after 3 a.m.

“I think there’s somebody in the house upstairs,” a terrified man whispered.

He had called 9-1-1 after being woken up by the sound of smashing glass.

“Can you hear footsteps?” the 9-1-1 operator asked. “Yes,” the man whispered.

“Are you still hearing the noises?” she asked. “Yes, yes,” he whispered.

Then his voice was changed. “Holy f**k. They’re coming,” he said.

A moment later there was shouting as the intruders entered the room, followed by muted sounds in the background. Minutes passed followed with only muffled voices, and the sounds of someone whimpering and crying.

“There are certain calls that never leave you,” the operator told the judge last year when the tape was played in court.

. . .

The 9-1-1 operators who work in the RCMP’s radio room have all taken calls like that – from people who’ve been robbed or stabbed or beaten up. From people who are frightened.

“People don’t call the police when they are in their moments of glory,” says Michelle, a 9-1-1 operator working on “C Watch” on a recent Friday night. “They call when things are wrong.”

Those who answer the calls have learned to take charge of conversations and extract key information in seconds: who, what, when, where – and weapons.

Of those, where is most important. “That’s the first thing you want to know,” says Gayle Hammer, manager of the telecommunications section. “If you lose the caller and you don’t know where they are, the rest of the story doesn’t matter because you can’t find them.”

. . .

At 10 p.m. on this Friday night, 9-1-1 operator Natalie sits at the complaint call taker’s desk, her face lit up by three bright screens.

Nearby, another operator talks to a man who says a group of drunk teens are threatening his neighbour.

“What are they saying to him?” she asks. “Is he yelling at them? Have they damaged anything?”

An hour ago, there was a robbery of someone taking money from a bank machine in lower Lonsdale.

At the moment, it’s surprisingly quiet. But that could easily change.

“Every time you pick up the phone you never know what’s going to be on the other end,” says Natalie. It could be quiet for an hour, “Then the phone rings and you have to go from zero to 60 in a second and a half.”

“We’re paid to be ready,” she says.

When the serious calls come, “You don’t get to do it twice.”

. . .

If police are the eyes and ears of the law on the street, the radio room is the nerve centre. Five people are working a regular 12 hour-shift here tonight from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. There are four regular watches, made up of four full-time operators plus a fifth casual dispatcher who works a shorter shift to cover breaks. North Vancouver has 16 full-time operators and as many casuals. All but two of them are women.

On this Friday night – often the busiest shift of the week – the room seems to hum expectantly. The women sit at their stations like plugged-in versions of the oracles.

The dispatchers here tonight come from varied backgrounds – Kristin, in her early 20s and the youngest operator here – tended bar while putting herself through university while Michelle used to work as a Telus operator. Some are single, some are married, several of them are mothers. Their time on the job ranges from five years to 20. But once they plug in, most stay.

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They not only have to remain calm in the face of sometimes heart-rending events, they also must try to calm the victims in an emergency.

And they often have to see to it that multiple tasks are being completed in a hurry while they’re doing all that.

It takes a special kind of person to keep doing that day after day, but there are several employees at the county who have been working in that environment since the centralized 911 system started 10 years ago.

“It’s stressful, because we’re the first person they talk to after something happens,” shift supervisor Timmy Fischer said.

Director Judy Tucker has also been there from the start, and so have shift supervisors Fischer and Jenny Keener.

Fischer and Keener said it’s the desire to help people that has kept them working at the center for so long.

“It’s being a lifeline for them when everything’s happening,” Keener said.

Both had worked in related fields before coming to work there — Fisher as a firefighter and Keener in health care.

They have their happy stories — Keener remembers talking a distraught mother through how to respond when her infant had stopped breathing. By the time responders arrived, the baby was breathing again and came out of the incident unharmed.

But they also have the ones they don’t want to talk about. They’ve answered a call to have one of their relatives in distress on the other end, and talked to people they’ve known since childhood during emergencies.

Overall, they learn to be detached enough to focus on seeing to it the people get the services they need, but that’s only part of what it takes to be a good dispatcher, Tucker said.

The other biggest factor is an ability to multitask. Dispatching is notorious for being a job with heavy turnover, and she said one of the biggest aids she’s found in reducing that turnover is a test that measures a person’s ability to complete several tasks at once.

In addition to looking for people who can handle that, she has to see to it new dispatchers get mandated training before they start working and each year after that.

“They actually have 80 hours of training before they ever take a call,” she said. That includes training as emergency dispatchers, meaning they’re all qualified to guide a person in providing first aid until first responders arrive.

Sevier County dispatchers have overseen 33,877 of those calls in the past 10 years, she said.

The county medical director helps oversee their training requirements, but Tucker provides the training to most officers, along with in-service training to complete requirements that they continue their education.

With all that help, along with software and hardware designed to help them, they have a lot of resources at their command. And they work as a team.

“A lot of times when a phone rings, if other dispatchers aren’t working a call already, they’ll pick up, too,” she said. That allows the other dispatchers to start calling emergency responders and getting help to the scene while the one who’s talking the victim is keeping them calm and doing whatever they can to stabilize the situation.

‘It’s stressful,” Tucker said,” But we’ve got to keep that sense of urgency the whole time.”

The comparable cost to Cleveland: $12 per call.

Maintaining dozens of disparate dispatch operations in Cuyahoga County is a costly undertaking, especially for the smallest suburbs, according to a study commissioned by the county with the aim of regionalizing the service.

The calculations are based on cities’ budgets for their dispatch centers, divided by the number of 9-1-1 calls received. They do not consider other non-emergency calls to police. Nor do they account for the cost of police, firefighters or paramedics racing to scenes.

The study by Attevo Inc., to be released today, is the first such snapshot of the county’s dispatch operations, including 47 police dispatch centers and dozens of additional fire dispatch units spread across 57 municipalities.

“The sheer numbers in a common-sense level make you question, is it necessary,” said Ed Jerse, the county’s director of regional collaboration.

The county has about $10 million collected from cell phone fees, to be used for much needed upgrades to the 9-1-1 system. The average hardware age is 9.8 years.

Norberto Colon, the county’s deputy chief of staff for justice Colon wants to spend the money on new equipment, starting with agencies interested in consolidating.

The county doesn’t have a magic number. But the report — the product of a $68,000, six-month study based on surveys sent to each municipality — considers grouping cities in four regions, with Cleveland operating a fifth center.

A typical U.S. county has five dispatch centers or fewer, according to the report.

In Cuyahoga, a few cities already share dispatching for fire and paramedics. In other areas, communities are studying the possibility of consolidating.

Cincinnati’s Hamilton County has handled regional dispatch since 1948 and now serves 36 police and 35 fire departments, charging them $18.30 for each dispatch.

Beachwood, one of eight cities that ignored the county’s survey request, averages $66 per call. But Police Chief Mark Sechrist does not want to combine operations with Shaker Heights, Euclid and South Euclid, as recommended.

Sechrist said he favors joint task forces and regionalized approaches to crime solving. But the “dispatch office is literally a phone call between life and death. It’s just too big of a bite to start with.”

Beachwood dispatchers watch video feeds, streamed live from squad cars, Sechrist said. They have maps of schools. They know who’s on vacation and who is ill. And they answer all kinds of non-emergency calls.

“We believe there’s nothing we can’t help somebody with,” he said. “We may not be able to come out and repair their car, but we can tell them who to call… That’s all part of it.”

Merging dispatch could mean losing amenities, Walton Hills Police Chief Kenn Thellman fears.

Walton Hills had 192 cell phone 9-1-1 calls last year and 414 calls from land lines. (All cell phone calls are first routed to the county’s Emergency Communications System downtown.)

But answering those calls makes up less than 40 percent of duties for the three full-time dispatchers, Thellman said. Like dispatchers in other small suburbs, they also file accident reports, plan emergency-management responses and take ticket payments.

“We’re against it,” he said. “With the influx of calls other cities will be getting, we’ll just be swallowed up by them.”

Mike Bailey, Hamilton County’s director of communications, has heard all those arguments before.

Most communities still maintain a clerk to handle operational tasks for the police department, he said. And within time, regional dispatchers become familiar with the detailed geography of the places they cover, even with some of the frequent callers.

Plus, he said, officers from neighboring communities can quickly respond if an officer gets into trouble.

Kevin O’Brien, executive director at the Center for Public Management at Cleveland State University, said some communities are too small to make dispatch centers cost effective.

But, he said, the county will have to do “a lot of handholding” to sell suburbs on consolidating.

Rocky River Chief Kelly Stillman, whose department is so short-handed its using officers to dispatch, said combining dispatch would require a steep learning curve. But he’s in favor. “Regionalization would take a big monkey off my back.”

Cleveland, too, supports consolidation.

“Everyone involved in safety communications understands that there are opportunities to consolidate and make the best use of our resources,” Safety Director Martin Flask said in an e-mail.

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She may be tiny, but Pei Pei packs a powerful punch. Not only can she sense her owner’s moods, she can contact emergency responders when he’s in danger. The service dog is a mix of a beloved family member and a diligent worker who could rescue her owner’s life if need be.

“Go get help!” James Taylor shouted to his 11-pound pug. Pei Pei ran to a phone on the living room floor and pressed both paws onto the large, circular button. The dial tone sounded. Praise followed.

With the press of that single button, service dog Pei Pei can dial 9-1-1. That’s a huge comfort for the retired Army police officer, who suffers from post traumatic stress disorder and hearing loss. Sometimes he falls too, so Pei Pei is his ‘saving grace.’

“Without her, I couldn’t imagine my life. I’d probably be home-bound a lot because of what I suffer severely. I know if I have any kind of problems, she’s going to help me right through it,” said Taylor.

When the Vero Beach resident is in a crowd, he sometimes feels panic. Pei Pei is his buffer and companion.

“If I’m out, like in Walmart or somewhere, I give her a ‘go out’ command, and she’ll actually circle around me to keep the people three and four feet away from me,” Taylor said proudly.

To help with Taylor’s hearing loss, Pei Pei is all ears.

“If someone knocks on the front door, rings it, wherever I’m at, she’ll find me in the house and then tap me, and I follow her,” Taylor explained.

If the fire alarm goes off, she’ll find him and turn in circles. If he’s having a nightmare, he says she’ll lick his face to wake him up.

Taylor rescued the pug from Halo Rescue in Sebastian. The Vero Beach-based organization “Dogs for Life” taught him how to train her, which took two years.

Taylor and his wife dote on Pei Pei. She has her own room and her own wardrobe of 34 tailored outfits.

“She just learns something every single day, and that’s what Dogs for Life has taught us; how to use her and live a happy, normal life,” said Taylor. It’s a life he’s glad to have with a friend and ally by his side.

Dogs for Life is raising money to build a service dog training facility in Vero Beach, specially for veterans. So far, the organization has placed three dogs in veterans’ homes.

A lifelong resident of Rockland County, Falco himself started his career as a police dispatcher at 19, and told his parents then that he would someday become the sheriff. He said they took it as light-hearted fancy at the time, but his election in November saw it fully realized.

“This is my ninth time being sworn in as an officer…and I know what it means to take that oath of office,” said Falco. “I promise to serve and protect to the best of my ability standing alongside the men and women of the Rockland County Sheriff’s office and every law enforcement agency in this county as well as the state and federal authorities.”

The new sheriff acknowledged that recent budget constraints have led to trying times in Rockland County, but said that due to the hard work of elected officials his office has come through no worse for wear.

“It wasn’t easy; [they] had to really bite the bullet and do some hard things and make some hard choices. But they chose to keep us largely in part, though,” he lauded. “My brother and sister chiefs came and stood here and testified about the relationships and the working together… and the domino effect that it would have if something happened to the Sheriff’s Office.”

Sworn in along with Falco were Thomas Zugibe for his second term as Rockland County District Attorney, Sherri Eisenpress as Family Court Judge and Alan Simon as the new Ramapo Town Judge.

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