I started dispatching at the Carlisle County 911 center in May 1997, straight out of high school. Within a few months I had my EMT license and was working the ambulance on my days off. I’ve done both ever since.
Carlisle County is rural. The nearest hospital is 30 to 35 minutes away, so every transport is at least a half hour. When I started, there was one dispatcher on shift and one ambulance crew on duty at a time. Every fire department in the county was volunteer, and the sheriff had four or five deputies.
When a second ambulance call came in, it fell to the dispatcher to find a second crew. Many of our EMS personnel held full-time jobs elsewhere, so we kept a roster and knew who was out of the county at what hours. That knowledge lived in the dispatcher’s head, and it had to be right.
There was no 911 addressing. Many homes had only a rural route and a box number, and a single rural route could cover an entire section of the county. Our phone system showed us the caller’s number, but not where they were.
So we built the map ourselves. On our days off, dispatchers and ambulance crews divided up the roads, drove them, and marked every house on paper with an X. From those maps we wrote turn-by-turn directions from the ambulance base to each home. When a number came in, we typed it into a system we’d built ourselves to pull the directions up. Call logs were handwritten on legal pads and kept in a file.
There was no advanced technology holding any of it together. The people were the backbone of the system.
“The paper maps still exist, but those are for backup purposes in the event technology fails.”
What’s changed
A great deal has changed since then. Carlisle now has 911 addressing, and nearly everything we once did by hand is automated. About the only thing still kept on paper is the personnel schedule.
The paper maps remain, though. No one uses them day to day. They’re kept for the day the technology goes down.
That says something. Even in a county that has closed most of its gaps, the plan for when technology fails is still people, and a map drawn by hand.
What hasn’t
Not every gap has closed. When we need to coordinate with an agency that can’t share information electronically, the dispatcher still picks up the phone and walks through the call, one agency at a time.
Agencies today can run cloud-native CAD and share an incident across jurisdictions at the push of a button. Some systems still can’t. They’re built for a different era, and when the pressure is on, they fall short. When they do, the work doesn’t disappear. It falls back onto the dispatcher at the console and the responders in the field, the same as it did in 1997.
Public safety technology has come a long way. But in communities like ours, people remain the backbone wherever it falls short. That might be a gap they work around every day, or the moment a system fails altogether. Someone always fills it.
If your system went down tonight, what would your people fall back on? And how often are they already the backup plan?
About the author
Gary Fraser, CMCP, is an Implementation Support Specialist at 10-8 Systems. He started dispatching at the Carlisle County 911 center in 1997 and spent 27 years as a Public Safety Telecommunications Manager with Kentucky State Police. He has worked as a part-time EMT with Carlisle County EMS since 1997 and completed a paramedic program in 2022.
Your people shouldn’t be the backup plan.
10-8 Systems builds cloud-native CAD, designed by first responders who have filled those gaps themselves. See what it looks like when the system carries more of the load.