Dispatcher Stress Has Been Around for At Least 100 Years. We're Starting to Deal with It

As I continue working on my non-fiction book about 911 Dispatchers, people hear about it and send me some interesting material. The winner this week comes from a book called The Boys’ Book of Firemen, by Irving Crump, published in 1916. The entire book is both an interesting read and a valuable historical resource. For my current work, however, the most relevant part has to do with dispatcher stress. Yes, over 100 years ago, dispatcher stress was real. Here’s a brief excerpt from page 191 of Crump’s book:

“It is no wonder then that some of the operators who have worked at Fire Alarm Headquarters have become nervous wrecks after having served their time. Some of them have been stricken with paralysis as a result of the constant mental strain they are under, and few ever live very long after they have been retired on a pension which the department grants them after a far too long and too arduous a period of thirty years’ service.”?

This is a remarkable paragraph in many ways. Crump was writing about Fire Alarm Headquarters in New York City in the early twentieth century. He manages to inform us about both the effects of the job-related stress suffered by the alarm operators and also his views on the pension requirements! ?As I was reading Chapter VII, “The Nerve Center of the Fire Department,” in which Crump portrays in painstaking detail the processes of receiving and dispatching alarms, I began to see why the fire alarm operators were stressed. There were no radios. Almost all communication from the scene of an incident was done by telegraph key in the nearest fire alarm box. If a telephone could be found in a nearby building, the chief’s aide would convey size-up information to the fire alarm operators verbally. ?The mechanical systems that supported response to a fire alarm were amazing. They included, for the 10% of companies still relying on horses for their motive power, a plunger that released chains in front of the horses’ stalls.

I have been saying for some time now that, regardless of the various evolutions in technology which enable 911 Dispatchers to have significantly more information very quickly, the conversation between the 911 Dispatcher and the caller in need remains a one-to-one, fraught communication. And the burden of the life and death responsibility remains heavy. In talking about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire of 1911, where 146 lives were lost, Crump notes: “Here a slip in the dispatching of an alarm would have meant a death list three times as long.” A version of that knowledge resides in every 911 Dispatcher’s mind.

And that’s just a part of the numerous job-related stressors that 911 Dispatchers contend with every day and night. Recently, I was talking with a firefighter about my research and told him that it’s only now that I realize that I was subjected to these stressors decades ago. We didn’t have names for them then. We put our heads down and went to work. Or we went out the door to higher-paying jobs. It’s not just the absence of a “stress language” with which we could name what we were experiencing. It was also the remarkable number of different stressors that come with the 911 Dispatcher’s job. The more research I do, the more I find myself saying, “Oh, yeah!” That makes sense. Or “So that’s what that was!”

There is a lot of good news on the 911 Dispatcher Stress front. Words like “hidden,” and “unrecognized” are being used less and less to describe 911 Dispatchers. Stress awareness is no longer viewed as a sign of weakness. Recognition and usable terminology to describe causes and signs of stress help us deal with the erosive effects of our jobs. Police and Fire Departments are taking steps to support the emotional and physical health of dispatchers. Dispatchers are helping each other cope with the emotional and physical rigors of their job.

Ideally, we are moving towards a time when dedicated people can do the job of a 911 Dispatcher without becoming, as Irving Crump put it in 1916, “nervous wrecks.”