Smooth operators

Andrew Glazer

COSTA MESA -- A call from a father who had just discovered his murdered

daughter still sticks in his mind after 20 years.

And she said she’ll always remember when she helped a man deliver his

baby over the telephone. And when dozens of calls came in reporting

horses trotting down Fair Drive.

But the key for the city’s 911 operators to stay sane, they said, is to

forget as much as possible.

That sometimes means never finding out if police were able to rescue a

girl from her abusive mother, or if firefighters extinguished a stable

fire before it burned to the ground.

“You have to move on,” said Olivia Ramirez, 53, who supervises the city’s

23 dispatchers. “But I think it adds stress over time, not having

closure.”

The city honored its 23 emergency dispatchers Wednesday with coffee,

pound cake and balloons. The party, held in the dimly lit dispatching

room and disrupted by sporadic emergency calls, kicked off National

Telecommunications Week -- one of the few times, a supervisor said, that

the behind-the-scenes workers are recognized at all.

Dispatchers need to be part psychologist, reporter, operator, data entry

person and occasionally obstetrician and emergency medical technician --

their desks are outfitted with books describing how to deliver babies and

perform CPR.

“If the average dispatcher sits back and realized all of the

responsibilities they had, no one would take this job,” said Tom Nunn,

who retired in December after 33 years.

They sit at cubicles for eight-hour shifts, listening to police, harbor

patrol, ambulance and firefighters’ radios while answering, prioritizing

and responding to hundreds of emergency calls.

Phones may be silent for hours before they erupt with incoming calls.

Susan Larimore, an 18-year veteran, sipped coffee and joked with fellow

dispatchers Wednesday until her phone rang. She swiveled her chair toward

the terminal, threw her headset on and began punching information into

her terminal.

“Is he attempting suicide?” she asked.

Thirty seconds later, she was joking again.

“You don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “But the minute that

phone rings, you have to get into emergency mode.”

But emergency mode, Ramirez said, stops when the shift is over.

“When I go home, I don’t answer my phone at all,” she said.