welcome to Cloudcast where you get an inside look at St cloud Florida's local government whether you live work or play here we're bringing you the information you need to better understand your city cloudcast is hosted by our
communications team including Miriam Bachelder Andrew Sullivan Deborah Carson and Jay B miller thanks for listening in to Cloudcast all right welcome St cloud welcome back to another great edition of Cloudcast we
are celebrating this week at the St cloud Police Department it's National Telecommunicators Week and we have special guests with us in studio today we have Lily and Hayden who are two of the calm professional voices that you
are going to hear if you ever have the need to call 911 in St cloud so ladies welcome thanks so much for being here thanks for having us great so tell us a little bit about telecommunicators week and and talk to us a little bit about the job that that you ladies do well um
we are dispatch police fire and medical for the city of St cloud um basically National Telecommunicators Week is dedicated to the men and women that sit behind the headset um they are the quiet voice that you hear when you call during your most dire times um and it's an
honor to sit with them um we have a fantastic crew and this week allows them to kind of just loosen up a little bit and they get to dress up and the community sometimes will bring dinner or donuts or just meals for them to partake
and we play games and uh we we kind of foster more of a a fun environment uh to kind of take away from what we do dayto-day from some of the stress right yeah and I know when we hear first responders we typically think police
officers firefighters EMS but you guys really are the first line of first responders cuz when when somebody's having their worst day ever you're the voice on the other end of the line so um very stressful job hayden kind of talk about a little bit about how you guys
manage the stress it sounds like this week is a great stress reliever with some of the activities going on it definitely is it adds a lot of fun into quite a stressful environment it can be for sure um but to be able to dress up play silly little games whether that be
guess whose pet we played last year I think this year we're doing guess the vacation spot it's just really fun so how long have you two been doing this kind of job and what prompted you to get into it well I graduated from Florida Atlantic with my degree in criminal
justice so fresh out of college me said "Let's apply to St cloud Police Department i've been here all my life and I've been dispatching for almost 5 years june will be my fifth year anniversary with the city." Nice yeah nice well thank you for the job that you do
um you deal with some tough situations and I know we're not going to go into anything that violates anybody's privacy but you know if somebody's having a heart attack if they're injured if they've had a car crash you know you're on the receiving end of a whole lot of stress but sometimes you get calls that
are maybe a little more humorous or you know they're actually fun calls talk a little bit about some of those types of calls that you get that are maybe a little on the lighter side well next year it'll be 20 years that I've been with the Count Center and the one that always comes to mind when people ask me
about your most memorable call was a woman that called and she was just hysterically screaming and he's and she's just yelling in Spanish he's choking he's choking i don't know what to do my baby's choking and we go through automatically we send the fire
department i'm trying to walk her through CPR instructions and one of the instructions is to lay him flat on his back and remove anything from behind their head and when I prompted that she said "Wait I can't get his paws out of the way to his chest." And I said "Ma'am
is is this a your dog?" And yes this is my dog but she was hysterical about her dog that was choking on a bone and I had to research quickly of how to do the Heimlick on a dog and I gave her him
instructions for her dog so did it work it did oh yay i'm so excited i was like inquiring minds need to know but of course you know like I said we we respond to all calls for service so the police did go code three to try and help her so like I said it's always it's not always what you think it's at the other
end and that brings up a good point chief Gerky has been very aggressive and outspoken with this since he's come here and I know it's been long-standing practice st claw Police Department really prides itself on the level of service that it provides to our
residents and if you need us we're going to be there so um you know you ladies obviously are a big part of that so thank you for that can you give us some tips i I think sometimes residents don't really know should I call 911 for this
should I not is it truly an emergency talk us through a little bit kind of the guidance that we give people for that i'd say if there's threat to life limb property that is a 911 call for sure okay absolutely you don't have to
actually like leave your information a lot of times you can absolutely be anonymous we have protocols that we follow whether it's first party second party third party the most important factor that we need is the like the location if you don't know the address then provide the intersection if you
don't know the intersection provide like the closest business that you can see or some type of landmark so we can send help so I have a question to um I'm sorry is that okay for me to butt in okay absolutely um because I had a a
little situation come up a ways back and I wasn't sure if I needed to call 911 or not so I called the non-emergency number instead but um this was from the um the great alligator incident when um I was coming home for lunch and the alligator's walking across the street
and went up to my neighbor's basically front door and stayed there and so I'm like I think I need to call somebody about this and at first I was going to call call 911 but I'm like it's not quite an emergency yet but I called the not
8916700 non-emergency number there's a pitch there for everybody they 6,700 non-emergency number and um they came and so everything ended up with a happy ending but would you say an alligator thing would that be worth 911 or would this Everybody has a different meaning
for what they qualify as an emergency so if you think if it's an emergency absolutely call we're not going to make you hang up we're not going to make you call back we're going to always We're not going to yell at you for calling absolutely not we will one of the stores they were literally robbed and it's a non-emergency line um but we process
those calls we don't refuse service like you call 911 we process right so that was an emergency that came through the non-emergency line correct but so you'll do you'll go any direction okay but definitely if the alligator has a person in his mouth that sounds emergency some
of us think if there's an alligator on your Porsche that's an emergency anyway so I'm not sure what law he's breaking but I feel like it should be something yeah we get them quite frequently there yeah animal calls for sure now I know in recent years the technology has evolved
such that you can actually text 911 so perhaps if you're in a situation where it's not safe for you to call you can actually text 911 talk a little bit about how that works you can for sure text 911 um we just see it on one of our
phone screens and um as you gather the information we enter it into our CAD system and process the call just about the same as we would if you were over the phone and I've actually taken a text to 911 call now I don't speak Spanish but this text was in Spanish and I
remember me and my partner we were on Google Translate one of us and then the other person was like "Okay look we're typing into the 911 call." Teamwork yeah teamwork it was definitely a Yeah blue shout out to you if you hear this is there any difference in the response
time that they get if they text versus call you so if I'm sitting in a closet hiding from a guy with a knife in my house it's the same as if I was calling awesome great great we talked a little bit about your background with your degree
for people who are interested I know we're we're always looking for great help in our 911 telecommunication center what kind of training do they need like who are you looking for and and kind of what makes a great Yeah i'm not sure I could do your job like so much stress and and it's just these big adrenaline
spikes and sometimes you might not even know how the case turned out right but but what's the kind of person you're looking for and what kind of training do they need and do they get once they get on the job i think the basic requirement right now is the high school diploma and being over 18 years of age we do have a
test that they have to take to qualify to be interviewed for it um so if you're interested in something in the comp center um we also offer for you for people to come and sit in and watch um so you would contact the training coordinator and uh set that up and you
would come in and you would see actual comp center like how it works so that's a great idea to kind of see really what the job it's it's never like it is on TV spoiler alert spoiler alert we have a a fantastic comp center with state-of-the-art uh camera systems and
our CAD integrated and it's it's really a beautiful thing to see um but if you are interested we I always recommend people uh practice KPH which is like a ten key 10 teni practice that cuz that's one of the segments that's uh highly
weighted on that test as well as words per minute so just I think it's 40 or 35 words per minute and kph or keystrokes per hour I think is 4500 so it's that's what I always recommend so so they can do a little practice ahead of time
absolutely you need we need people that can multitask and when I say multitask it it's it's a different it's a different kind of multitasking it's a different beast when it's in the comp center basically you'll be listening on the phone toning out your fire stations listening to your trainer listening to
your trainer and talking on the radio and this all kind of happens together which is pretty cool and I love that you let people come in and watch that happen because I think really until you sit and spend some time seeing that you really don't have a concept of how that works
so yeah so I always tell people on interviews that we don't get paid to be busy we get paid to be amazing when it is busy that there's like a when the 911 line rings you can feel like a pause in the room sometimes and then when a statement is made like your baby's not
breathing or he has a gun there's a pause in the room and then everyone kind of takes their part of their position and it runs like a beautiful for me it's always like a beauty to watch i love it i'd say being able to work on a team too is very
crucial because you have one person answering the phone calls one person dispatching another person running their licenses vehicles whatever it's all a collective unit for sure absolutely so
would there be occasion where one operator might be taking multiple calls at once for sure if it if it gets to be that bey cross trainined in every position unlike some comm centers where you just come in and you only do phones and then
you graduate and you go to fire radio and you graduate and you go to another position we're trained to do all positions so at any time they can literally be running the radio and picking up a phone call for service at the same time so that's what I mean that multitasking where you can still
effectively hear your caller on the phone and still respond to your units that are calling you on the radio without missing a beat well that might be what sets our department head and shoulders above the rest type of cross trainining agreed and Jay I'm glad you said that cuz we're going to brag on you
guys for a minute so you are a triple accredited comm center talk a little bit about what that means um how you got there and really more importantly what it means for our residents and the service that you're providing for them well what it means for the residents is that it doesn't matter who's on the
other end of the line you're always going to get a high quality service like it doesn't matter who you are whether you're calling in English or you're calling in Spanish or you're calling in another language those protocols are designed to switch between those languages and help us get you the help
that you need being a is a lot of work um we have a Q team that goes through our a huge volume of calls to make sure that the they are up to standard as far as quality assurance and it's it's it's
a daily daily thing a daily endeavor cuz it's it's a lot of work it's not a thing you do once and put it on a shelf for 3 years until it's time to rehab right so well truly kudos to the two of you and to the rest of our amazing team over there that's that's no
small accomplishment not many agencies are triple accredited like you are so I think we're number 11 in the world i think there's only 13 if I'm not mistaken wow that's great wow that's that's very elite and speaks very well
to the quality of the people that we have on the other end of those phones when they ring so I have one more question i'm sort of known for asking you know hard-hitting questions of our guests and so oh boy y'all aren't going to get out of here without the question
i try so for um telecommunicators week will they be bringing you pizza i hope so usually yes okay all right all right so it's something you're used to that they do cuz um I'm very concerned
about that so I am too now okay i might have to put the word out that you guys need pizza for that i think you just did we have pizza that's a great No the these ladies and gentlemen that that work in our comm center do a great job and on behalf of
all of us at the city and our residents thank you um you're often kind of the unsung heroes sitting in a dark room um taking those calls and being truly on the front line of of first responders so thank you we wish you a very happy
telecommunicators week and enjoy your week you've certainly earned the accolades and we appreciate you thank you so much it was a pleasure thanks for stopping by that's it for this edition of Cloudcast don't forget to like follow
rate and review and we'll see you next time on Cloudcast