Dispatchers

Dear Joyce: I recently attended a seminar for airline flight dispatchers. An eight-week training course to produce FAA-licensed aircraft dispatchers is being offered at the cost of $2,200. The school promises to assist in entering this field but there are no guarantees. I am very interested but I don't want to throw away my money. Please, I need advice. -- D.W.Dear D.W.: An aircraft dispatcher is a good job that's hard to get. It's one of the best available to high school graduates. The nation's airlines hire only about 1,500 of them and most hang in until they're old and gray, so the turnover is low. Dispatchers love their jobs, my sources say. The job pays well, offers job security and provides travel benefits.

It was the voice on the other end of the phone that kept Neysan Sturdivant calm on the night of Sept. 4 after his wife, sitting next to him, yelled, "Stop the car!" In a second, the Severn couple's minivan was on the side of Route 32 in the darkness. Sturdivant's wife, Gillian, was giving birth, minutes away from Howard County General Hospital. He ran to her side of the vehicle and opened the door to help — but didn't know what to do. He asked 911 for help. "I had the phone in my ear," Neysan Sturdivant recalled, saying that most of what immediately followed "is a blur.

"Stay on the line . . . I'll tell you exactly what to do next."This potentially life-saving message comes from Harford County's 911 dispatchers. They want callers, often panicked, to realize that they can help a sick or injured person if they will listen to a few simple instructions.They also want callers to know that an ambulance is sent on an emergency no more than 30 seconds after a 911 call is received.The new messages are part of a Harford program called Emergency Medical Dispatch, which began in April to provide better medical assistance to county residents.

It was ridiculous to read that the Maryland National Guard is being sent to Texas to patrol the border ("Md. National Guard to aid patrol of Mexican border," April 19). The only people coming over the southern border are the very poor who are desperate for some semblance of a decent life. If the Maryland Guard is in need of work, I think a better use of its members would be to go after the corporate tax cheats. For example, the guard should be arresting the CEO and the board of Wells Fargo.

NEW YORK - US Airways Group Inc., which filed for bankruptcy protection last week after failing to win concessions from workers, reached agreement yesterday with the Transport Workers Union on a cost-cutting contract for 151 flight dispatchers. The accord will provide savings of $4.5 million to the Arlington, Va.-based airline, including lower wages, said Don Wright, president of the union's Local 545. US Airways is seeking the concessions to help it cut $800 million in labor costs. The agreement, which must be ratified by the employees and approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Court, "was painful but necessary," Wright said.

A computer glitch that hampered Carroll County 911 dispatchers' ability to track ambulances and firetrucks during a four-alarm fire in Manchester last week may strengthen arguments for buying a new computer-assisted dispatch system.Fire and rescue officials have said that the Dec. 5 blaze, which produced fumes that hospitalized 30 firefighters, also has prompted a review of emergency response procedures."We've been in the process of looking for a new CAD [computer-assisted dispatch] system, probably for several months now," said Howard S. "Buddy" Redman, chief of the Bureau of Emergency Services Operations.

"Stay on the line . . . I'll tell you exactly what to do next."This potentially life-saving message comes from Harford County's 911 dispatchers. They want callers, often panicked, to realize that they can help a sick or injured person if they will listen to a few simple instructions.They also want callers to know that an ambulance is sent on an emergency no more than 30 seconds after a 911 call is received.The new messages are part of a Harford program called Emergency Medical Dispatch, which began in April to provide better medical assistance to county residents.

Carroll County officials are exploring the possibility of consolidating emergency dispatchers and using one police channel to make the county's law enforcement agencies more efficient in sending officers and keeping track of them at a crime scene. "I fully support the concept of consolidated police communications. I couldn't fathom fire rescue services having a mix and match," said Scott Campbell, acting administrator of the county's support services for the Office of Public Safety. He said that his office still needs to see how feasible such a plan would be. Campbell said the space limitations of each agency will factor into how quickly consolidation could happen.

Mark Hemler has a photograph of a 2-year-old Pylesville girl and a letter from her mother framed and hung on a wall of his Havre de Grace home.Hemler helped save the girl's life last August when she stopped breathing during a seizure caused by high fever. Her mother, Mary Jane Dykes, wrote Hemler a letter thanking him for his help rescuing her daughter, Amy.For Hemler, it was all in a day's work.He is one of 20 dispatchers at the county Emergency Communications Center in Hickory. They serve as a lifeline between those who need help and those who provide it.Since the centerbegan using the 911 emergency telephone system in 1984, dispatchers have counseled on delivering babies, instructed callers how to resuscitate heart attack victims and talked the desperate out of committingsuicide.

A hysterical woman dials 911, trying to get help for a friend who apparently suffered a heart attack."He came to visit, and he had a beer, and he was sitting at the table and talking, and now he's blue," she tells Cynthia Tucker, a Baltimore emergency fire dispatcher, who is asking a series of questions.The caller demands to know when the ambulance will arrive, and Tucker assures her that help is minutes away.What the woman doesn't know is that Tucker's questions are part of a new protocol designed to provide better care.

Anne Arundel County police officers and firefighters have made themselves clear: They don't believe the county's leadership can help their departments solve staffing and technological problems that they say pose a threat to public safety. The county firefighters union's vote this week of no confidence in Fire Chief John Robert Ray is the latest expression of discontent by public safety workers. Following the lead of three police unions that called on County Executive John R. Leopold to step down, the firefighters union has scheduled its own no-confidence vote on Leopold for Tuesday.

Anne Arundel County's new emergency dispatch system, shut down because of problems shortly after it was introduced in December, remains unplugged as repair work continues amid complaints from police unions. The combined public safety system from Tiburon Inc., with computerized dispatch and police records components, cost $6.6 million. Although county officials initially said they thought they'd have the dispatch system working again in a month, they have yet to set a new date for putting it back online.

Baltimore County officials announced Thursday that they have launched a $76 million radio system for police, fire and other emergency crew members designed to improve sound quality, cover more territory and make transmission more reliable. County Executive Kevin Kamenetz told a gathering at the Circuit Court building in Towson that emergency communications equipment is "one of the most important public safety investments that any community can make. " Like new bulletproof vests for the police or a new fire engine, he said, the new digital system improves emergency crew members' "ability to protect our community.

After more than two weeks of chronic problems in the rollout of the county's new multimillion-dollar emergency dispatch system, Anne Arundel officials decided Friday to shut it down. The county will use the system it had before Dec. 6 while it tackles software problems in the new one, which has outraged police officers and firefighters and led their chiefs to recommend suspending its use over safety concerns. "I'm glad they're listening," said O'Brien Atkinson, president of the largest police union.

Maryland's newest terrorist life form — the brown marmorated stink bug — may eventually meet its archnemesis in the form of a tiny prizefighter of a wasp from Asia. The parasitic wasps that are being raised in quarantine in a Delaware laboratory are not glamorous-looking bugs. They are black, stocky and about the size of the comma in this sentence. But they are uncommonly efficient at hunting down and injecting their offspring into stink bug egg masses. In true horror-movie fashion, the larvae consume the stink bugs from the inside out. When the wasps grow into adults, they chew their way out, procreate — and go on the hunt for more stink bug eggs.

Joe Flacco 's postseason coming-out party turned into an old-fashioned barbecue of the Kansas City Chiefs. With a strong arm, surprising elusiveness and unshaken confidence, Flacco delivered his most impressive performance in the playoffs, throwing two touchdowns in their 30-7 rout of the outclassed Kansas City Chiefs in a wild-card game at frigid Arrowhead Stadium. Recording their largest margin of victory in the playoffs since their Super Bowl triumph in January 2001, the fifth-seeded Ravens advance to play the second-seeded Pittsburgh Steelers on Saturday afternoon in a divisional game at Heinz Field.

The moment Samuel Shirtcliff felt his chest throb, the 39-year-old trucker eased his rig off the highway, snatched his cell phone and hit 911. "I think I'm having a heart attack," he told the dispatcher in March. As he began to explain where he was, the line suddenly went silent. By the time rescuers combed 50 miles of tangled Dallas highways to find him, Shirtcliff was slumped in the cab, dead. When 911 operators receive a land-line call, the address pops up on their computer. But with cellular phones, all they get is a blank screen.

Two veteran Anne Arundel County 911 dispatchers were suspended with pay yesterday for failing to report the carjacking of a Glen Burnie pharmacist to police officers who might have been able to intervene before the 26-year- old woman was killed, authorities said. The information from an anonymous caller about several men assaulting Yvette A. Beakes could have been critical, because police believe Beakes' abductors drove her around for several hours before they took her to a wooded area in Southwest Baltimore and shot her in the head last Thursday.

Patrolling the vast reaches of the Chesapeake Bay and its major tributaries has always been a difficult task for law enforcement officers. But a new $2.4 million radar-and-camera network is giving them a clear view of boat traffic from the port of Baltimore into the Potomac River. The Maritime Law Enforcement Information Network allows Natural Resources Police dispatchers in Annapolis to track and intercept suspicious vessels and speed assistance to boaters in distress. Dispatchers can draw an electronic "picket line" around a sensitive area such as the liquefied natural gas terminal in Calvert County, a cruise ship approaching the Inner Harbor or an oyster sanctuary near Tilghman Island.

- A 7-year-old boy who called 911 while armed robbers threatened his parents hugged and delivered a high-five to the dispatcher who took his call. The boy, identified only as Carlos, told reporters Wednesday he remained calm during the ordeal because his mother used to make him practice dialing 911 in case of emergencies. Carlos gave a hug to Los Angeles County sheriff's dispatcher Monique Patino, who called the boy "my little hero." The assailants invaded Carlos' home and held his parents at gunpoint Tuesday while he and his 6-year-old sister hid in a locked bathroom.