OGDEN, Utah — Every year, the second week of April is recognized as National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, to highlight the work on the dispatchers who are the first ones to answer the call in a crisis.
"It’s behind the scenes, they don’t get a lot of recognition for a job that is harder than anybody realizes,” said Tim Lewis, a manager at Weber Area Dispatch 911.
When it comes to public safety in Weber, Morgan and parts of Box Elder Counties, dispatchers at Weber Area 911 are the first ones to respond. Being a dispatcher was Shauna Trujillo's dream job.
"Every day, I go home knowing I at least helped one person or at least was a smile for one person for the day, no matter what it was,” she said. She has been working there for 13 years.
"Our role is the most vital,” Trujillo explained. “If we don’t have a location for anybody to respond to, or information to get to them, there’s nobody going anywhere. This is where it starts."
She said some days can be a lot, especially when the calls include death, or when she hears that children might be involved.
“I have two teenage children myself and when I hear about car accidents, I relate myself to it,” Trujillo said.
Weber 911 has a growing team. They have about 55 people working various shifts and recently added 4 people to handle the increased call volume for dispatch for Brigham City, Tremonton, Garland, and Perry, too. Lewis said there is a big emphasis on training dispatchers to be ready for any situation.
"There’s two difficult things to figure out on every call - where is it and what is it,” he explained. “And the more upset a caller is, those two things can be very hard to figure out."
Lewis said artificial intelligence has been helping with some of that training.
"The most recent hire group, we were able to create AI scenarios of every single 240-something call types that we have, load them all into a computer and they can sit down and just take calls and it interacts with you like a human being,” he said.
They also use AI to screen all the calls for quality assurance.
Dispatchers also play a crucial role in helping keep responders on the ground safe.
“We get all the information we possibly can so that officers or medical units know what they're walking into,” he said. "Our dispatchers are amazing, I’m so proud of them. And they are heroes that nobody ever gets to see."
