By Nicole Ascher
One calm night, while
working in the Kansas Highway Patrol dispatch center, we received a call from
OnStar advising of a crash that just occurred involving a semi and a van.
A young mother who was not wearing her seat belt was distracted by talking on
her cell phone.
She went left of
center, left the roadway, went across the median and struck a semi. It
took troopers 20 minutes to arrive and they advised of one confirmed
fatality. It took another 20 minutes for the troopers to give a tag and
ask for dispatch to locate a driver’s license photo for identification
purposes.
Just as we pulled up
the photo, the victim’s mother called in and advised that her daughter’s
husband called her, and told her he was on the phone with the victim when she
screamed and the cell phone disconnected. Once the family heard about the
accident on the interstate, the victim’s mother and young child insisted on
responding to the scene, to make sure her daughter was okay. The
dispatcher told the mother to take the child home and she would have a trooper
respond to her house to let her know what happened. Troopers were busy
working the scene so dispatch attempted to get a chaplain to go to the mother’s
residence.
The mother called the
Kansas Highway Patrol dispatch center multiple times and the husband called the
local dispatch multiple times. An hour later, troopers were able to
identify the victim from the driver’s license photo and responded with the
chaplain to notify her mother and husband. We do our very best to calm
our callers and let them know that help is on the way. The dispatcher
thought of her mom and wanted to tell her over the phone.
Death is one of the
hardest things to deal with and families deserve to be treated with respect,
passion, and professional comfort. Our hope is to give a victim’s family
the gift of having someone to hold on to, or to make a phone call for someone
who can come to the home and provide emotional support. During times like
this, dispatchers feel helpless. Without visual information from the scene,
we are left to our own imagination in an attempt to figure out what
happened. Our main focus is helping people. We do this as a team and
help our fellow dispatchers when they are busy. An incident like this will
stick with the dispatchers for several days.
Dispatchers
experience trauma indirectly and with a high level of distress during and following
an incident like this. One of the hardest things about being a dispatcher
is the lack of closure and not knowing what happens after calls are dispatched.
At times this is a thankless job, but at the end of the day…you know you did
your best and it is worth it.
Nicole Ascher is a Communication Specialist Supervisor
with the Kansas Highway Patrol
Thanks for sharing your experience Nicole. It's a very difficult, and thankless job but we really appreciate how you and your colleagues are able to help others in times of need.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing Nicole. I was always appreciative of the efforts of our KHP dispatchers when we Troopers were dealing with notifying families of the death of a loved one. The Patrol is a great "Team" that I was a part of for many years and you have proven that that fine tradition is being carried on. Great work!!
ReplyDeleteI know what you're talking about, I useed to sit in the same chair at Troop B
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