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Deep in the Ant Farm w/ LAFD's Brian Humphrey
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Bunker blogger: (ENLARGE)
LAFD's Brian Humphrey |
It's dark down here, four stories under City Hall East.
It's always 73 degrees. It's usually quiet. Just the murmur of 11 L.A. Fire dispatchers per shift answering 911 calls - 1,200 of them a day. Fires, wrecks, illnesses, industrial accidents, cop calls, dumb non-emergency questions, explosions, heart attacks and sudden deaths - most handled within 90 seconds each.
I grabbed a nice lunch yesterday with LAFD blogger/spokesman/ubergeek Brian Humphrey (more about his cool projects below) who showed me around what's variously called the Bunker, the Ant Farm and the Emergency Operations Center - the central dispatch point for every single emergency handled by L.A.'s 103 fire stations ...
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Commander's station, Emergency Operations Center dispatch room |
As Brian puts it, the joint is "drowning in raw data." Each dispatcher faces four or five screens full of it - street addresses, map lookups showing every fire station, school, house, condo, commercial building, hydrant and utility pipe in the city, and a log of calls incoming, active, dispatched and cleared.
He let me plug a headset into the phone line operated by a firefighter-dispatcher named Cecil, who handled a couple of routine LAPD dispatch calls (injury car wreck with two 60-year-old women reporting chest pains, an info-verification call on a fire crew's location) and a thorny one from an apartment complex on the west side:
A landlady makes the call, distraught, saying someone's in trouble in Apartment 9.
Someone's moaning inside but no one will come to the door. No idea what the emergency is - Cecil dispatches a crew from Station 58 and cajoles the woman into getting a neighbor to open the door. We hear wailing in the background, but the landlady is useless as far as finding out what's wrong.
She finally hands the phone to a man who's a bit more composed. He says there's someone down.
"Is the person conscious? Is the person breathing?" Cecil asks.
"I don't know, I don't know, but she's down. Send Rescue 58"
"Sir, Rescue 58 is on the way, we've already dispatched them. I need you to go into the apartment and check on the lady for me. Is she conscious? Is she breathing?
More wailing in the background. It sounds like two women completely losing it.
"I think she's dead."
"Can you look at her? Is she on her back? Is she breathing?"
"No, no. Send Rescue 58."
View of the dispatch center |
"Sir, I told you they're on their way, now I need you to turn her over for me."
"Okay, puttin' the phone down."
A little clatter, a horrible pause.
He picks up the phone again. "Nope, nope. Rigor mortis."
"Sir, there's a chance we can help her, can you see if she's conscious, can you check if there's anything blocking her airway?"
"Nope, rigor mortis."
"Sir, I need you to check her, can you see if there's a pulse?"
"Oh, well, nope. She's rigor mortis. She's cold."
"Sir, I need you to tell me, do you think there's anything you can do for her?"
"Rescue 58's outside, they're comin' up."
"Sir, can you tell me, is there anything you think you can do?"
"I don't know, I don't know. Do you think there is?"
"Sir, I need you to tell me that."
"Nope, I don't think so. Rescue 58's here."
Rescue 58 radios in to confirm they're on scene, end of call.
Just one of dozens that Cecil would handle on his 24-hour shift - four to five hours on, an hour or two off, four or five more on, maybe an hour off - like the other dispatchers, his day is broken up into chunks of focused dispatch time interspersed with sleep, meals, a shower and training.
There are other calls that day - an average day - more than two dozen medical emergencies (they make up 82% of LAFD 911 calls) and a handful of fires during the half hour I spent in the dispatch center.
No money in the city budget for diffusers to cut down the glare of the fluorescents, so the dispatch crew built their own out of cardboard |
Some calls are a bitch: Cecil remembers a stabbing victim calling from his cellphone as he drove around looking for a hospital. Dispatchers talked with the guy for more than 20 minutes, trying to get him to hold still long enough to identify landmarks so they could come to help him, but he got lost somewhere in the Valley, didn't give them enough information for them to find him and they lost the call.
They never did find out what happened to him.
Most calls are pretty direct, though - chest pains, shortness of breath, freeway crashes, a report of a baby abandoned by the Metrolink line in a plastic bag turns out to be someone's spoiled groceries - and dispatchers helped guide at least two callers through delivering babies yesterday.
It's a big city. 4 million people. 140 languages and dialects (there's always English, Spanish and often Korean on duty in the bunker - translators for the others are a quick phone call away).
Supper's cooking on the bunker grill. |
Wanna-be dispatchers need a minimum four years of fire-crew field experience to even qualify for the job - a standard of experience that Humphrey and Dispatch Chief Brennan are adamant can't be met by civilians, as proposed by City Controller Laura Chick. (Note - Brian extended the lunch invitation to me long before Chick's audit came out recommending replacing firefighters with civilian dispatchers).
But the Emergency Operation Center's a hell of an interesting place. Built to Cold War specs with six-inch blast doors, it survived the Northridge earthquake and even a complete system crash four months ago that left the department nearly deaf with a handful of backup dispatch stations for the 20 minutes it took to helicopter dispatchers out to the reserve dispatch center in Coldwater Canyon.
 Meanwhile, a few words on blogger Brian Humphrey - who's one of those rare guys; a workaholic public servant whose energy and creativity is limited only by his crappy slice of the city budget.
In addition to scratch-building the the department site back in the misty pre-Netscape era of 1993, and launching the LAFD blog in December, 2004, he's talking about launching a podcast service, inviting civilians to Flickr their photos of firefighters at work - and using XML to pipe the FD's dispatch-call data straight into live, customizable car-crash and fire maps on your cellphone.
Dispatch map - crosses are medical calls, flames are fires or other hazardous calls |
Given the development support, Brian envisions a system that pumps emergency alerts or maps into your phone any time you come within a mile, a block or 100 feet of an accident or fire - or any time an incident is reported anywhere near your home, work or school.
In the private sector, Brian would be a 6-figure-salaried CTO with an army of developers. But here, he's just a solo webmaster/blogger working 24-hour shifts four stories under City Hall East, for a huge, busy department, on city wages ...
He smiles the same happy-with-his-gig smile whether he's bullshitting on the horn with TV reporters, mapping one of L.A.'s 56,814 fire hydrants or grousing that he'd put more useful maps and images into the LAFD blog if only the city's budget could cough up for just a single licensed copy of Photoshop.
Donations, anyone?
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| Posted by: Mack_Reed on Friday, April 28, 2006 - 10:31 AM
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