Unsung Heroes

As I got out

of my car in front of the restaurant, I saw that I’d arrived at the exact same time as my friend. She and I dashed under the awning as quickly as we could to avoid the rain that was still drizzling down outside.

The café was very crowded and noisy at 10:00 in the morning on Saturday. We grabbed one of the last booth tables and settled in. First it was, “how’s the family?” And then more of, “what did you do last night?” I’ve known this lady most of her life and although she’s younger than me, she has the wisdom and maturity of someone who’s seen a lot. Catching up was so wonderful and I was very happy to hear that her family was all doing so well.

After the waiter took our order and brought around the coffee, I told her about my quest of writing a romance novel revolving around The Valley Fire, that took place more than a year ago on September 12, 2015.  Once she got the idea of what I’m doing , I asked about her perspective on the fire. You see, she’s a Lake County Sheriff’s Office Dispatcher.

I’m not using her name out of respect for her and her request that I don’t, but if you know who she is, you will understand. She’s a private person that holds a stressful job and carries herself stoically while doing it. Dispatching for more than a decade, she’s a veteran in a field that rarely gets recognition or praise. But that is the farthest reason why she does it anyway. She does it, “simply to serve.”

On September 12th, she was supposed to attend a friend’s wedding, but she never made it there. Instead, she embarked on a multi-day back to back shifts of dispatching due to one of the most devastating fires California has ever had.

On most days at the office, they have 2 dispatchers on. By the time this fire was in full force, they had up to 5 people and it was still crazy.

When the initial calls started coming in about The Valley Fire, it was a small fire in a residential area off of Cobb Mountain. It didn’t sound unordinary. But then she said it began to have spot fires and before they knew it, there were multiple fires sparking off of this one fire. They’d turned it over to Cal Fire by then and the calls really started to multiply as did the air traffic they were dealing with.

Now, something that can be noted, is weeks prior to this, there were two substantial fires called The Rocky Fire, and then The Jerusalem Fire, which were quite hairy in their own right. These preemptively helped in a way because the dispatchers were pretty well dialed in on what they needed to do for such disasters. However, they never could have imagined the enormity of what The Valley Fire would become. Nobody could.

They were calling up off duty people who were trying to leave town, or people on vacation to return and help. In all fields from Sheriff Deputies, to dispatchers, and any emergency personnel they could get, they were asked to assist. They had a Search and Rescue crew headed to training out of town and they too were asked to turn around and return as quickly as possible. The fire had morphed into not just some wild land fire, but this inferno that made it more important to evacuate and save lives now, and less important to save structures. And there were THOUSANDS OF SOULS that needed evacuating. It was all hands on deck!

When I asked how she handled it all personally, she said, “There was simply no time for personal feelings. We had a job to do, but you know a lot of these people on the other end of these radios are like family to us! We kept pushing it down and worked because they needed us. But when the calls we got were with people screaming in the background, and you could hear the roar of the fire….. it got pretty real!”

The fire had swept through the Cobb Mountain area so fast and there were so many people that had to evacuate, the emergency personnel tried to jump ahead of the fire and started warning people in Middletown to evacuate. Some of these people would get angry and say, “Well we don’t see any fire here yet and it’s quite a ways away from us so why do WE have to leave?”

These people had no idea what was coming and how unpredictable the fire was behaving. Most people cooperated but some simply didn’t listen until the last possible minute and then the traffic to leave was atrocious! The Hidden Valley Lake area was at risk next, so mandatory evacuations took place there next.

“When this happened I will never forget that one of our officers was in there trying to get people out,” my friend told me. “He came over the air and said, ‘I’m trapped and there’s no way for me to get out!’ After we heard him say that, for some reason, there was no other air traffic, no phone calls coming in, and complete and utter dead silence in the office. I will never forget that silence. It felt like time just stopped!”

We paused the interview there and let that sink in. We sipped our coffee and pondered how helpless that felt for her. She told me she just wished she could have done more. “I sit there in that climate controlled room all day and it’s hard to feel like you’ve done enough,” she said.

I assured her

that everyone I’ve spoken with that had ANYTHING to do with this fire ALL, felt like they hoped they’d done enough. They all wished they could have done more. Each person from emergency services people, to basic citizens, had all felt like they wished there was more they could have done.

“Of course, shortly after we heard him screaming for help to get out of there, and we experienced our deafening silence, we heard another one of our deputies get on the air and say he’d not only been able to save him, but his patrol car as well. They were both really lucky!” she told me.

Once the first initial day and wave of terror had rolled over everyone, there were unbelievable phone calls they got from citizens offering up horse trailers to haul out animals. There were other people offering up their property to house these poor animals. Wonderful people of our community that just wanted to help called dispatch and they then put the word out.

My friend alone, worked that day from 6:00 in the morning until 10:00 that night, doing what she could before she felt safe enough to leave for awhile and go home to rest. Sixteen hours working at dispatch at high levels of stress, with people crying, screaming, and panicking on the other end of the line. Countless people’s lives that were forever changed and she had to somehow compartmentalize these sounds, feelings, and memories, and she turned right around and was back at it the next morning at 6:00am. She did this for twelve days straight. If she was off duty during that time, she was still not to go more than 30 minutes away from dispatch office in case they needed her to return in a hurry. This, of course DID happen, that while she was away, she was called right back in. Everyone was basically “on call,” and tensions were very high.

In my mind

these people who we call when we dial 911, are true heroes! They are the first people we talk to in any crisis, and they are the ones that get help to come. They are the unsung heroes that are usually faceless to us, but the voice of an angel when you are crying out for help.

“In the end, we still have a job to do. It’s the spirit to serve that keeps me going. I never forget that,” she told me. “No matter what kind of day I’m having or what is going on in my personal life, when I drive to work I have this mantra that I say over and over. It’s the spirit to serve, the spirit to serve, the spirit to serve. I say it like a meditation almost. That’s what keeps me going. Because I’ve lived in this county for such a long time, these people I work for are my family out there. The word, community is an underrated word. It means far more than we can verbally express. So I will continue to have the spirit to serve for my community. they are family.”

I am especially grateful for this interview and again feel we are all indebted to all dispatch personnel for what they do for our communities every day.