Frank Abderholden, Chicago Sun-Times

“Calm down, calm down, you’re making it worse,” counsels Sarai Soto, 21, of Zion as she handles a 9-1-1 call in the Waukegan Dispatch Center on a recent Friday night.

“How old are you? Is there anyone who can help you? A bystander? Just calm down and try to stop crying,” she says to a woman who was having an asthma attack at Bowen Park. “Try to calm down, don’t talk to me if it makes it hard for you to breathe,” she tells the woman.

Emergency telecommunication operators are the general public’s lifeline in an emergency that can sometimes mean life or death. These professionals play a critical role in the emergency response system and it can be a stressful position.

For Soto, working the police side of emergency communications when the asthma attack call came in, said calls of a medical nature are easier for her because she is a firefighter/paramedic who wasn’t able to find a full-time job in her field so she branched out into dispatching.

“The fire side is easier to sync in,” she said because her background helps. “The police side is intense.” Her asthma call ended after she was able to determine where the woman was in the park and her boyfriend ran and got her inhaler for her. “The ambulance is on its way. They’re just going to check you out. No, you don’t have to go to the hospital,” she said.

The Waukegan dispatch center handles hundreds of calls a night, and the four dispatchers, including Supervisor Donna Monk, 48, of Waukegan, rotate in and out of fire and police dispatch positions so no one becomes too stressed. A part-time dispatcher comes in so the others can go to lunch.

“There’s a lot we do,” said Monk, such as monitoring the weather and other radio frequencies, pulling up criminal histories and checking for warrants. Sometimes they need to send notification to ICE, the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

She has 24 years on the job and she is pretty matter-of-fact about her duties. “It’s work,” she says, “and there is lots of overtime.” It does get exciting when the dispatcher has a hand in catching someone, like a burglar.

“That does get me excited when we catch some burglar,” she said, because breaking into someone’s home is just so wrong on so many levels. She is also amazed by some people’s stupidity, usually the suspect’s, such as when people steal an iPhone. “They have an app to locate it, so the victim will call us and say, ‘I’m at the home where my iPhone is at,” she said shaking her head.

Joe Jones, 36, of Winthrop Harbor has worked in dispatch on and off for about 11 years. He said their mid shift can be the most active, “but time goes by faster.” “It can get hectic, there’s a lot of phone calls, but usually we can dissect it whether we need to send an officer,” he said about some calls like criminal damage to property, stolen articles or a missing person, which are sent to the front desk so more officers can stay on the road.

Jones said they often get people calling 9-1-1 when they meant 411 and other non-emergency calls. “The most annoying are juveniles calling on nonworking cellular telephones because you can’t call back,” he said, explaining that a cellphone can still call 9-1-1 even if it has no service.

He has handled every type of call except a real-life kidnapping, like the recently released movie “The Call” about a dispatcher played by Halle Berry who inadvertently gets a kidnapped woman killed.

“I’ve had kidnapping calls, but then later we find out it wasn’t,” he said. His adrenaline gets pumped whenever an officer is physically chasing a suspect. “Then you need to listen for calls like “a guy just ran thought my backyard” or “A guy just jumped my fence and broke it,” he said. “Sometimes those are very dramatic.”.

Erica Lesnjak-Wenzel, 41, of Wildwood, said dispatchers switch seats every two hours to give people a break. “There are a lot of calls that don’t make sense,” she said, like the ones that come from a pay phone in the psychiatric unit of the local hospital. They also have regulars, like one guy named Terrence who uses a non-working phone to call 9-1-1 in Chicago and then they transfer it to Waukegan because he says that’s where he is, and he usually reports a weird event.

She explained that they are all certified emergency medical dispatchers, which requires 24 hours of class and then another 24 hours of continuing education over a two-year period. This allows them to walk people through different medical scenarios until the ambulance arrives.

Stress, she said, is “seriously not too bad. The most stressful part is when you’re on the fire side and you run out of apparatus,” she said. Working a mid shift can be tough on the family. She has a 19-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter.

“My father was a police officer, so we are used to having Christmas on an off day,” she said. “It’s very hard during the school year to see my kids because I work until midnight,” she said.
Pull Quote: “It can get hectic, there’s a lot of phone calls, but usually we can dissect it whether we need to send an officer.” Joe Jones, dispatcher.

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