By P.J. Reilly, Intelligencer Journal/New Era
Original publication date: Dec. 27

Lancaster, Pa — Today, Lancaster County-Wide Communications employs 76 full- and part-time dispatchers at its state-of-the-art facility in Manheim.

When the department was created in 1971 as the Lancaster County Public Safety Communications System and was housed in the basement of the old county almshouse on the grounds of Conestoga View Nursing Home, there were six dispatchers manning the now-antiquated, plug-in switchboard.

Carlton “Skip” Walls was one of them.

“Most of the time, there was only one of us on at a time,” Walls said. “We had a speaker in the bathroom, and if you were in there and a call came in, you finished your business and you ran out and answered the call.

“You had to. There was no one else there.”

On Dec. 17, Walls retired from County-Wide Communications as the last-remaining original employee of the department.

Joining him on his final walk out the door were Becky Reever, Margaret Flinchbaugh and Joe Mohr. Collectively, the four veteran dispatchers take 132 years of experience with them into retirement.

Walls retired with 39 years of service; Mohr had 35 years; and Flinchbaugh and Reever both worked 29 years for the county department.

Looking around the County-Wide Communications headquarters Dec. 17 at the array of computers dispatchers employ, all four retirees commented on how far technology has advanced in their field.

“We didn’t have anywhere near the equipment we have today,” said Reever, who left the department as the most senior dispatcher still working the phones.

Mohr, Flinchbaugh and Walls all worked in supervisory or administrative positions at their retirements.

But it’s not the computer systems they’ll talk about to friends and family in the years to come.

It’s stories about callers, tragedies and triumphs they dealt with over the years that they’re most likely to recount, they said.

“I have learned in all my years, I will never say, ‘I’ve heard it all,’–” Reever said. “Because the next time you pick up the phone, it’s something different.

“We’ve heard people die, and we’ve heard babies being born.”

Mohr recalled the night he answered a call from a man reporting an accident who said his name was “Michael.”

When Mohr asked him his last name, he said the caller told him he was “Michael, as in the guy who rowed the boat ashore.”

The caller then started singing “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” to Mohr on the phone.

In the 1980s, two dispatchers would answer every call, with one person talking to the caller and writing down pertinent information on a card, while the other person dispatched emergency crews.

Walls was talking to a caller about an incident at Groff’s Funeral Home, but he abbreviated “Funeral” as “Fun.” on the information card, and he listened in horror as his partner dispatched medical teams to “Groff’s Fun House.”

A roller-coaster day for Reever came several years ago when she talked a woman through delivering her own baby.

Still euphoric from helping in the birth of a child, the very next call Reever handled was from a man whom she had to instruct how to perform CPR on his dying mother.

“You can go from one extreme to the other extreme in here,” she said.

Today, dispatchers have counselors available to them to talk about particularly distressing calls.

Twenty-five years ago, Mohr said, “You just had to have thick skin. There was no one to talk to.”

“People call us when they are at their absolute worst,” Flinchbaugh said. “And we have to just do our job.”

Without question, the four agreed that working the day of the shootings at the Amish school in Nickel Mines was the most taxing – emotionally and professionally – they experienced in their careers.

Every available person in the communications center was pressed into duty as police and other emergency crews responded to the scene of the shootings.

The more people there were at the scene, the more the communication traffic increased.

And as word of the tragedy spread, parents worried about the safety of their own children, and journalists from all over the world started calling County-Wide Communications.

“It was a difficult day, not just because of what was happening with that incident, but also because of the amount of calls we had to handle,” Flinchbaugh said.

And the shooting wasn’t the only incident requiring police, fire company and emergency medical attention Oct. 2, 2006.

Among the “other” calls dispatchers handled were reports of a suicide and a house fire in which a resident died.

“People don’t realize this, but we had 607 other calls that day,” Reever said. “Our day doesn’t stop with just one call. We had to answer them all and give them all the same attention.”

About the Author
Contact P.J. Reilly at preilly@lnpnews.com.

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