COMMUNICATIONS
The Foundation of It All
By Lynda Giusti-Parra
| Lynda Giusti-Parra is a former firefighter/para- medic who retired in 1996. |
This article can be found on
page 20 of the Mar/Apr 1997
issue of 9-1-1 Magazine.
It's a rainy, December morning. I unlock the door to the division of training, grab my coffee cup and walk across the grounds of fire headquarters. Between our temporary, trailer-like building and the kitchen of the adjacent firehouse, a 2500 square foot, concrete slab, lays waiting for the framework and the sheet rock that will shelter a brand new Fire Department communications center.
It's unusually quiet in the big house; the engine company, the truck, the support unit, the bat chief and the chief's operator are all at a structure fire. As I pour coffee into my cup, I hear a muffled voice over the scanner echoing that the fire has been knocked down.
I gaze out of one of the picture windows and watch while the construction foreman gets down on all fours to check the wooden forms around the cement. His knees, resting in puddles of water, create a rippling effect around the muddy perimeter. The hood of his sweatshirt drips water over his brow, covering his head like soaked tar paper.
It's funny how I am looking at the foundation to this building and how I can picture in my mind what is drawn on the blueprints: a small gym; two locker rooms; a kitchen; a dorm and the main communications center. While I sip my coffee, I compare it with the foundation from which my career as a firefighter was built, over five years before.
I was hired as an emergency medical dispatcher for the city. I was already a paramedic with a private provider. As a candidate for dispatch, I remember one of the chiefs, on the panel of my oral interview, suggesting that my field experience would get in the way of my being able to use the card system while rendering pre-arrival instructions; he thought that I would rely heavily on my skill as a medic to instruct the callers.
Actually, my field experience proved to be an asset, but I was immediately humbled when I sat down next to my training officer, who could take a complaint receipt faster than the computer could digest the data.
Not only that, the dimension of helping people over the phone didn't have the same calming effect that showing up on scene of an incident usually did. I grew frustrated with repeating that help was on the way, while trying to ascertain the patient's history. I was used to evaluating the environment the victims were found in simply by taking an investigative look around. I had not yet learned to do this over the phone.
Still, all around me, dispatchers could hold a conversation with someone who would walk into the room, listen and acknowledge the radio traffic of our fire apparatus and all of the ambulances in the city, type something into the computer, answer a phone line and broadcast an incident - all at the same time.
I thought I was doomed from the get-go. But, after a while, it got so that even I could recognize voices on the radio. By virtue of being a paramedic, I could interpret medical terminology and convey the effects of certain drugs to the other dispatchers. My typing speed shot up to about 100 words per minute.
It also got so that I had to get out of the center at dinner time. We use the same platoon shifts for dispatchers that we do for line firefighters: one 24 hour shift on; two off, ten days a month. Although I was acclimated to working 24 hour shifts as a medic, I wasn't used to the ensuing cabin fever that working in the center fostered.
I had been involved in personal fitness training prior to my date of hire. When my supervisor encouraged me to use my dinner time to work out, the first place that I headed for was the apparatus floor where the weight equipment was stored.
I remember looking at the fire engines, parked on the apparatus floor, and feeling like a little kid. I would sit in the driver's seat when no one was looking; I would touch the shiny, red paint and grab a handle on the cabinets to open it and take a peek inside.
I don't ever remember making a conscious decision to pursue firefighting as a career. Instead, I remember hanging around on the drill ground, asking a lot of questions while the engine and truck companies practiced suppression or rescue operations.
Radio traffic at fires is nothing short of hectic; indiscernible at times - breathless and urgent. When the crews would ask for things like a supply line, a pike pole, an attic ladder, or a rope bag, I was able to parrot the request but I had no idea what the tools were used for or what they looked like, so I signed up for a couple of fire science classes at the local junior college.
Still, I was merely testing the waters. Several firefighters suggested and encouraged me to take the department's firefighter test. I thought that they were out of their minds; I told them so, too. But, a year prior to the exam, I had checked out a book at the library that had practice questions for the written exam.
In the meantime, back in the communications center, we had acquired a menu-driven CAD system. The learning curve was high, but the system proved to be more effective, especially since we didn't have to share it with the police department. Somewhere in the middle of all of the transition, I knew I wasn't going to be a dispatcher very much longer.
I passed the physical agility and subsequent oral interview. I was ecstatic that I ranked number 17 out of hundreds of candidates. Yet, while I was anxiously learning how to catch a hydrant, how to throw ladders and how to fight fires, I realized that I left a large portion of my heart in the communications center.
To me, it is the hub of EMS. It is with the first report of a medical or a fire incident that our wheels are set in motion. It is the communications center that elicits the important information that is conveyed to the responding units. It is the dispatchers who achieve the first, personal connection to the caller before we arrive on scene, as they render pre-arrival instructions, or simply, reassure the caller that we will be there in a matter of minutes.
I take my cup of coffee over to comm center and sit in front of one of the consoles and I feel right at home - until two radio frequencies broadcast traffic, three 9-1-1 lines light up, a couple of people walk in to inquire about an incident and I can't remember which computer mask accesses incident histories.
Not to be defeated, the A-shift supervisor gently reaches over my shoulder and presses a couple of keys on the keyboard to unlock the monitor.
"Remember, it's like this?" she asks, empathetic to my frustration. With a couple more keystrokes, it comes back to me, but not before I understand just how far I've traveled down a completely different career path.
And, wherever that path leads me, I will never forget where the foundation of my fire service career was originally built.
