‘Hot Call’ Stress Victimizes 911 Operators : Emergency response: The constant handling of life-and-death situations can bring satisfaction, but it also takes its toll on the county’s 325 dispatchers.

ANAHEIM —  It took a few seconds for 911 emergency telephone operator Ron Adkins to realize that it was a “hot call.”

Jonathan Lopez, 6, was on the line, explaining to Adkins in a calm but forceful manner that his grandmother was lying on the floor.

“Is Grandma able to talk?” Adkins asked in an even, practiced tone.

“Uh-uh,” the boy responded. “She can’t talk right now because she is hurting. . . . I think she’s hurting everywhere.”

In fact, Jonathan’s diabetic grandmother, Maria Herrera, had lapsed into unconsciousness and was on the verge of death. Adkins’ instincts told him that the boy’s bright, spunky voice belied the severity of the crisis.

Within three minutes, Adkins, a 29-year dispatching veteran, had directed a team of paramedics to the house to treat Herrera for a hypoglycemic attack.

The 2 1/2-minute call that saved Herrera’s life was a small part of a routine working day for Adkins, one of about 325 emergency operators and dispatchers in Orange County.

“We get ‘em all,” Adkins said as he intently watched his computer screen flash more than a dozen codes, which represent responses to emergency calls into the North Net Fire Communications Center. The center answers emergencies in Anaheim, Buena Park, Fullerton, Garden Grove and Orange.

“To be a good dispatcher, you gotta have a lot of common sense and know how to improvise whenever possible,” Adkins said. “You never know what’s going to happen.”

The professional lives of police, fire and ambulance dispatchers vary intensely. At one moment, a dispatcher may be listening patiently to a woman complaining about losing her false teeth, or to a man grousing about how his neighbor dented his car.

The next moment, the task might be talking a hysterical mother or father through the Heimlich maneuver to save a choking child, or advising an abused wife to flee her home until police arrive.

For most dispatchers, the adrenaline surges that pump during a “hot call”--and the depression they may feel when they listen to the more routine agonies of life--are balanced by their knowledge that they can often save lives.

“There’s a lot of stress involved, but there can be lot of satisfaction too,” Adkins said.

Psychologists studying stress among dispatchers liken it to battle fatigue or post-traumatic stress disorder, when soldiers suffer physical and mental problems derived from being subjected to constant danger.

Clinical psychologist Eric Gruver, who heads a stress management team for emergency personnel in Orange County, said stress felt by dispatchers is unique, because they are in constant touch with danger and disaster but are unable to do anything about it directly.

“The dispatchers have to handle all of the overwhelming parts of a major call,” Gruver said. “And they certainly experience the helplessness of not being able to help the individual.

“They suffer from the deleterious effects of vulnerability and being out of control.”

No statistics have been compiled on how many dispatchers suffer from acute stress, Gruver said. But North Net manager Terry Mathers said that in recent months, two of his dispatchers were forced to leave their jobs. One female dispatcher developed a bleeding ulcer, while a male dispatcher quit a day after three babies died during one of his 12-hour shifts.

“This job is not for everyone,” Mathers said, adding that dispatchers “have to be assertive and have the presence of mind not to panic.”

One of the biggest challenges dispatchers face is gleaning information from a hysterical person, who may have just witnessed a murder or fatal traffic accident.

The dispatcher is often the only contact for that person and is responsible for coordinating an effective response, such as which hospital to send an accident victim to or which police department to ask for pursuit aid.

The war stories are legion. Two weeks ago, a California Highway Patrol dispatcher got a call from a woman who dialed 911 on her mobile phone. She reported that she was following her husband’s car, which had been stolen a day earlier.

“What are the chances of that happening?” CHP communications supervisor Susan Josing asked.

But even CHP dispatchers, who normally receive accident-related calls and divert calls about life-threatening situations to fire dispatchers, have their trying moments, such as when a woman calls from a car phone to report a rape or a motorist calls to report a freeway shooting.

One CHP operator received a frantic call from a woman stopped on a freeway at a call box, Josing said. Between almost incoherent screams, the dispatcher learned that the woman’s brother, who was being taken to a mental hospital, had jumped out of the car and was walking on the freeway.

As the woman pleaded for aid on the telephone, she watched a car strike her brother and kill him, Josing said.

“You have to remain calm, but you feel helpless,” she said. “Those calls are the hardest.”

Erin O’Brien-Myer, a dispatcher for the last five years at Orange County Communications--a network for emergency-response agencies--coordinated a vehicle pursuit from Buena Park to San Pedro in December, for which she will receive an award for superior performance from the California Public Safety Radio Assn.

O’Brien-Myer coordinated all the radio traffic that went over the air as several police departments joined the chase, which ended with the capture of two suspected armed robbers.

“If something goes down, like shots fired or something, then I need to be totally in tune with what’s happening,” O’Brien-Myer said. “I get information from other sources, then I send it out.”

Anaheim police dispatcher Brian Whiteside said he will never forget two particular calls.

It was shortly after 4 p.m. on May 24, 1990, when Whiteside received a 911 call from Richard Bourassa, a Canyon High School junior in Anaheim Hills who said he had accidentally shot a friend, Christian Wiedepuhl, in the head.

While Bourassa’s voice remained cool throughout the conversation, “I could hear the other boy in the background screaming,” Whiteside said.

The address seemed strangely familiar, he said. Then it dawned on Whiteside that he had handled a call from the same teen-ager in a similar case almost four years earlier.

In 1986, Whiteside, who had then been an operator for just one year, received a call from Bourassa, who told him that he had accidentally shot another friend, Jeffrey Bush.

The taped 911 conversation of the second shooting was used as evidence in a hearing in which a judge decided that Bourassa should be tried as an adult for murder.

“Sometimes you can hear the violence,” Whiteside said. “You can visualize what’s happening. You get some people who are on the edge.”

But most of the estimated 11,000 911 calls that flood the Anaheim Police Department switchboard monthly are relatively routine, Whiteside said. Some are so offbeat that many dispatchers save the cassettes. Savoring those types of calls, they said, helps to alleviate the tension that builds up over an eight-hour shift.

Fire dispatcher Janice Wildermuth still laughs when she tells about the elderly Oceanside woman who called her one morning to complain that she had been sick all night. When she vomited, her false teeth fell into the toilet bowl.

Concerned, Wildermuth asked whether everything else was all right. The woman became irate and demanded that a firetruck be sent to her home to help her fetch the teeth.

“I told her, ‘Sorry, but what you need is a plumber, not a fireman,’ ” Wildermuth said.