Dispatchers

"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.

Baltimore police reported that a man was shot in the face in Sandtown-Winchester on Saturday night. The shooting was reported about 9 p.m. in the 1800 block of Presbury Street, police said via Twitter. The area is northwest of downtown. The victim was taken to an area hospital, police said. He was described as a black man in his mid-20s. Detectives were notified, police said. No other details were immediately available. sdance@baltsun.com twitter.com/ssdance

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.

Going back 25 years, mobile phones, as they were called in those days, were the size of small briefcases, and were prohibitively expensive and impractical for the average person. In those days, police officers communicated mainly by radio dispatch and volunteer firefighters and ambulance crews in Harford County were issued radio pagers which activated whenever a network of transmitters broadcast a signal that emergency help was needed at a particular location. Now, of course, almost everyone has at least one portable phone - we call them cell phones or just "our" phones - and they're small enough to carry just about anywhere.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

Raymond C. "Ray" Bingel Sr., a retired Baltimore Sun dispatcher, died Jan. 4 of cirrhosis of the liver at his Glen Burnie home. He was 69. Mr. Bingel was born in Baltimore and raised in Glen Burnie, where he attended Anne Arundel County public schools. He worked in an auto parts store before joining The Baltimore Sun in 1970 as a newspaper delivery truck driver. Mr. Bingel was later promoted to a dispatcher at Sun Park, The Baltimore Sun's Port Covington printing plant, where he worked until retiring in 2000.

Anne Arundel County will not revive the new emergency dispatch system that it unplugged a year ago, but will instead scrap it and modernize its old system. Launched in December 2011, the new dispatch system operated for just three weeks before it was shut down when law enforcement officials and fire chiefs were besieged by complaints from police officers, firefighters and dispatchers, officials said. The county could not immediately provide figures on how much money it spent specifically on the computer-aided dispatch, or CAD, system, but officials said the county has paid an overall $6.2 million on a $6.6 million technology contract that included the dispatch component.

When it comes to the relationship between Southern Californians and massive storms like Sandy, the conventional wisdom is that such weather (“such” meaning the kind not commonly found in Southern California) can give rise to just a tiny bit of gloating. Think of it as stormenfreude. Were it a real word, “stormenfreude” might be defined as this: “Pleasure taken by those in temperate climates at the suffering of those in less temperate climates, especially in the wake of a storm that causes said temperate climate inhabitants to justify all the other miserable things about their region by asking, 'Why would anyone live there?

A City Council resolution requesting that the Baltimore Police Department share active 911 responses online was met with resistance from police officials Tuesday during an initial reading before the public safety committee. Police said the city's Computer Aided Dispatch system is too dated to perform the task. The Police Department and various other city agencies are in the process of developing "a much more robust CAD system that would offer these types of capabilities," but the new system won't be in place until September 2014, said Maj. Joseph Smith, who commands the department's Central Records Section.

Charles B. "Charlie" Elder Jr., a retired dispatcher who enjoyed collecting Christmas ornaments, died Saturday of multiple organ failure at Johns Hopkins Hospital. The Hydes resident was 44. Charles Bailey Elder Jr., who was born in Baltimore and raised in Hydes, graduated in 1986 from Dulaney High School. In his youth, he had been active in the Boy Scouts. Mr. Elder attended Widener University in Chester, Pa., and had worked for 15 years as a dispatcher in the Cockeysville office of Alarm Watch, a security company, until last year.

As an unseasonably warm St. Patrick's Day drew to a close in Baltimore, teens by the hundreds swarmed downtown, keeping one step ahead of police while battling from corner to corner, mostly with fists, sometimes with knives. As authorities watched from a helicopter and on video from surveillance cameras, youths marched seemingly at will through the Inner Harbor and streets north and west, frequently clashing that Saturday night. Dozens of officers called in from across the city scrambled to keep up with the attacks, shutting key intersections and trying to push the youths away from the center of tourism.

A sudden movement, a startled cry -- it's Bubba!That's the generic name Baltimore County's 911 dispatchers give the field mice infesting their portion of Towson's county courts building. The rodents are among a number of maintenance woes at the multimillion-dollar center.But while they sometimes joke about the mice, workers say other problems at the center are more serious.They complain that exhaust and urine odors seep into the air system from the parking garage below the 911 center. They say the center isn't kept clean.

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.

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.

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.