HAMPTON, Va. — A spare moment is a rare one for the line of work Derek Scalese is in.
When the phones inside Hampton's Emergency Communications Center (ECC) keep ringing, Scalese and his fellow dispatchers keep answering without missing a beat.
“I can tell you right now it’s just as hard as it is here as it is out there. They’re the first line of response," Scalese tells 13News Now. He supplements his time as a full-time firefighter with Hampton Fire & Rescue by working as an emergency dispatcher.
Days seen as "busy" meet a different threshold, for a career where there is always someone on the other end of the line who may be experiencing a moment of distress or an emergency.
"We've had 245 calls since 6:30 a.m.," Samantha Dilker, a dispatcher, told 13News Now. "It’s actually a pretty slow day for us.”
In their years of experience, there is little that is left to the imagination from what they may hear in a typical shift.
“So I’m listening and it starts escalating, a man ends up pulling a gun and puts it to a woman's head, it got really... and she was able to basically give the right information, send the officers the right way," Scalese said.
"There was a house fire with three children who passed, and I heard them say 'Bring out the white sheet," Dilker responded when asked if any call in particular stuck out in her time as a dispatcher.
Across Hampton Roads, the seven city localities currently have vacancies for a combined 111 emergency dispatcher positions, according to data from each respective police department.
Here are the vacancies by city:
- Norfolk: 29
- Chesapeake: 20
- Newport News: 20
- Virginia Beach: 18
- Hampton: 15
- Portsmouth: 7
- Suffolk: 4
“We've definitely seen a drastic decrease in interested applicants applying for the position, so that affects how many people we’re able to hire and bring in," Kim Hendricks, director of Hampton's ECC, said.
Currently, there are both state and national pushes to improve hiring success across the emergency telecommunicators field.
In Virginia, a bill that would have allowed localities to pass improved retirement benefit practices for full-time dispatchers was tabled until 2025.
While Hampton has fewer vacancies than other localities in Coastal Virginia, Hendricks admits it's difficult convincing prospective applicants to willingly take on a job that with their level of pressure.
“It’s tough being a dispatcher, we go from call to call to call. Once police are dispatched they handle that one scene. We have that one and ten more all at the same time. We hear things that no one else is going to hear, we can hear a mother screaming because her baby stopped breathing. Shots fired on a radio," she said.
"Kids grow up wanting to be police officers, doctors and firefighters. They don’t grow up wanting to be dispatchers," she added.
Last year, U.S. Rep. Norma Torres (D-CA) reintroduced the 911 Saves Act before Congress which she says would lead to big changes for troubled 911 centers struggling with staffing shortages and high call volumes.