Dispatching Data Collection, Then and Now

Fires, Emergencies, False Alarms. They were the three categories of events captured by the FDNY when I became a Fire Alarm Dispatcher in 1973.?Mistakenly, they were thought to be the true measure of dispatcher workload.

Initially, we dispatchers were too busy to step back and look at it any other way. Eventually, we realized that we were not giving ourselves enough credits for “NSO” alarms. Not Sent Out. These were duplicate alarms for the same event. We were supposed to fill out an NSO fire ticket so it could be captured, at the end of each day, along with Fires, Emergencies and False alarms. But we were typically far too busy. It didn’t make sense to take the time to fill out an NSO ticket when you knew the incident was already being responded to and fire phones were ringing in front of you. It just seemed, to the average dispatcher, to be too risky. You don’t know, even after answering twelve calls for the same car fire, that the thirteenth call isn’t going to be for an occupied building fire. Emergency calls cannot be triaged until they are answered. So, not too many “NSO” tickets were filled out during busy alarm periods.

What brought us to a more complete understanding of insufficient dispatcher workload measurement was a complaint from a citizen. ?She said she had called to report a car fire in one of our less populated areas and listened to the phone ring a couple of dozen times before she got an answer. The car was toast. The woman was annoyed. So were the managers to whom the call was ultimately referred. So, what did the managers do? Really, the only thing they could do with what they had. They took a look at the borough dispatching records for the date and time of the complaint. They found only three incidents in progress when the woman called with her car fire. It looked like somebody was not doing their job. Maybe poor supervision. Maybe lazy dispatchers. Not things that anybody liked considering.

However, upon further review, it was found that nobody was shirking their duties. In fact, everybody working at that time was doing their duties. Furiously. Because it was brush fire season. Forty-five years ago, there were a lot more open undeveloped areas in Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens and The Bronx than is the case now. The three active incidents working, when the woman called with the car fire, were large brush fires. Which could be seen for long distances in every direction. So, lots of people called in to report smoke, flames or an odor of smoke.

Review of the tapes showed the typical conversation on the NSO alarms for these three brush fires lasted just long enough for the dispatchers to determine where they were, that no buildings were involved and to assure the caller that help was either on the way or already there. Followed by the same dispatchers immediately punching the buttons for the next callers. The dispatchers did not take the time to record an NSO alarm with another fire ticket. The lady with the car fire had simply been waiting her turn for an available dispatcher to pick up her call. ?

An inaccurate initial conclusion had been drawn from the data that was available.

Before we had Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD), we did not get a comprehensive measurement of dispatcher workload. But we went home tired. We knew we were working hard. So, in true solution-oriented dispatch fashion, we had off-duty dispatchers volunteer to come in to manually count all of the phone work that dispatchers did. It was found that, in addition to the undercount of all those NSO alarms, true workload measurement was made difficult because many of the calls answered by Fire Alarm Dispatchers had nothing to do with Fires, Emergencies or False Alarms.

People would call on emergency phone lines for non-emergency reasons, like finding out where to get permits or to get an open fire hydrant shut off. We would get calls for specific firefighters where the caller did not know in which of the 400 or so units throughout the city this friend of theirs worked. There were also units calling back in service on in-house phone lines, after a run. All of these calls had to be answered. They kept dispatchers from being available for Fire and Emergency calls. ?And, most importantly for this discussion, they did not get counted in official statistics.

Capturing all this phone work by manual counting on clipboards, it was determined that the measure that had been used for decades to quantify dispatcher workload was unreliable by a factor of 8 to 12, depending on the borough being measured. We were doing 8 to 12 times more phone work than anybody officially knew. Between that and our rotating schedule (a matter for a future article), no wonder we were tired!

This is not to say that the data we did have was of no use. It did clearly demonstrate to the public the number of Fires, Emergencies and False Alarms the FDNY responded to. Those numbers were impressive on their own. But they told only a part of the emergency communications story. Having some data can cause you to think you have complete data. You can point with pride to your “data-driven” operation and not look any further into possible additional data needs. A good question managers should ask periodically about their data: “Is our data necessary but not sufficient?”

That was “Then.” How about “Now”?

By contrasting some aspects of emergency dispatching history with your reported current practices, I hope to show growth in the speedy and accurate processing of calls for help. This demonstrated evolution of your profession is cause to be proud of what you do. It can also inspire communications managers (and I know many already do this) to routinely seek improvements in a structured way (like a Quality Committee, aka QA, QI, CQI) in their PSAP’s; in order to keep that professional growth going.

One of the many useful things associated with CAD is the generation of management information (without clipboards!). How does your department use CAD-generated data?

To determine staffing?

To assist with budgeting?

Public Relations?

City Planning?

I’m guessing you are probably better informed “Now” than we were “Then.”

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This is the first of a series of articles about Emergency Dispatcher History. While doing research for my novels about dispatchers in 1970’s Brooklyn, I had difficulty finding published work about the history of Emergency Dispatching. Much of what I did find in my latest search for Emergency Dispatcher History was relatively recent, usually coinciding with the implementation of the 911 system, starting in 1968.

At first, I thought this to be a little bit odd, since Emergency Dispatching is such a important element of our communities. ?However, dispatchers have historically been referred to as The Hidden Professionals and Hidden Heroes. I myself wrote an article for Fire Engineering Magazine in 1989 called “Dispatchers’ Hidden Critical Incidents.” Dispatchers’ low-key delivery of critical messages, a hallmark of reliability and professionalism in the field, can contribute to their generally low public profiles. Only when there is drama and not even always then, do Emergency Dispatchers make the news. Which is fine as far as it goes. But no-drama execution of your duties should not preclude Emergency Dispatching from written histories of Emergency Services.

With these LinkedIn articles I hope to stimulate both currently working and retired emergency dispatchers to contribute to the history of this remarkable group of public servants. I will provide what I know of “Dispatching Then” and I hope others will add their experiences with “Dispatching Now.”

Thanks for reading!

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