Emergency Run Ending
Matt Lakin, News Sentinel (Knoxville, Tennessee)
MORRISTOWN – Before Hamblen County had a 911 system, it had Jimmy Peoples.
Peoples, the county’s first E-911 director, retired Friday. He’s overseen emergency dispatch here for nearly 23 years, worked as a rescue squad volunteer for more than five decades, and helped train dispatchers and first responders around the country – even earned a mention by name in the ballad about Tennessee’s second- deadliest highway crash ever.
“I just saw a need and tried to step in,” Peoples said. “If somebody has the misfortune to be in an accident or some other emergency, it’s good to have the skills to help them. We like to go home to our families, and we want to get these officers and everybody else home to their families as well.”
His emergency service career started out in front of a different kind of radio more than half a century ago. Peoples, then a 21-year- old disc jockey for a local radio station, signed up as a volunteer for the Morristown Rescue Squad in 1958.
Drownings and car wrecks made for the bulk of rescue work in those days. But the call he’ll never forget came 40 years ago this spring when a tractor-trailer and a Greyhound bus hit head-on near Bean Station in the wreck known in story and song as the Bloody 11W crash.
Fourteen people young and old died that morning of May 13, 1972, their bodies scattered across the U.S. highway’s pavement. Peoples still remembers hearing the voice of the first officer to reach the scene as his words crackled over the radio.
“His voice just exploded onto the radio in a tone that was bone- chilling,” Peoples said. “It was just so enormous. When you see kids hurt or killed like that, it just stays in your mind forever.”
The hit country song of the same name recorded by Jim McGinnis tells how “The rescue squads played their parts like actors in a play. … Jimmy Peoples called Morristown-Hamblen (hospital) and said, ‘Get ready, it’s real this time.’ ” Peoples and others spent hours helping clear debris, remove bodies and haul away suitcases, satchels and other luggage stained with blood and soaked with diesel.
“We brought it all to the rescue squad building,” he recalled. “Getting those clothes and other things back to people from their loved ones seemed to help give them some closure. For months after that, we could still smell the diesel fuel – that, or it was in our heads, one.”
Peoples’ experience made him a natural choice for director when Hamblen County consolidated emergency communications under one roof. Peoples started work Nov. 1, 1989, with little more than a crew of dispatchers and a switchboard.
“I had nothing in my hand but a pencil and not too many brains,” he said. “We had two dispatchers and one computer in the whole building.”
Peoples hired eight dispatchers to cover all shifts. Four still work here two decades later.
Hamblen County’s E-911 center today operates on a million-dollar budget and averages about 10 calls per hour, with at least one of them usually an emergency – medical or otherwise. Today’s calls come more often from cellphones and voice-over-Internet systems than the old-fashioned landlines.
Peoples said he’s confident his successor can handle the challenges ahead. Eric Carpenter, the new director, previously worked as county emergency management director for nine years.
“There’ll never be another Jimmy, but we just want to carry on what he’s established,” Carpenter said.
Peoples said he doubts he’ll be bored in retirement. At age 75, he still carries a radio, still runs on rescue calls and sees no reason to stop.
“That’s my fishing and my golf game,” he said. “I love technology, and I love to see people get the help they need.”
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