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Dispatch supervisor Hillary Luff answered two urgent phone calls simultaneously.
One requested medical assistance for an unconscious person and the other detailed an individual trapped in a house fire.
Which call must she respond to first? Who should be deployed? What information needs to be gleaned in a timely manner?
“You have to make that decision and you hope that it’s the right one,” said Luff, a dispatcher with the Bakersfield Fire Department for more than 21 years. “That can be very trying on you.”
Though this particular scenario is only an example, dispatchers make daily split-second decisions akin to this situation. Each decision could determine if a person lives or dies…
