Fire Dispatcher Steps Out of Shadow as Unit is Honored for Role Saving 2 (Free Article)

When Ladder Company 111 last December responded to a house fire at 436 Lewis Ave. in Brooklyn and used a bucket truck to rescue a mother and son via a second-story window, the teamwork required was apparent to anyone who witnessed it.

But what was out of sight was the coordinator of the Brooklyn-based Fire Dispatching team that got Ladder 111 to the scene and then provided the precise location and status of the trapped civilians when seconds made the difference between life and death.

The Fire Dispatchers who made that happen recently got a rare turn in the spotlight when they were awarded the Brooklyn Borough Ops Citation by Fire Commissioner Daniel Nigro at a ceremony last month.

'Initial and Critical Link'

“Dispatchers are the initial and critical link between New Yorkers who need our help and the brave men and women of the FDNY who respond to more than 1.7 million emergencies each year,” he said. “They are experts in providing medical instructions by phone, navigating callers to safety, and assigning essential resources to support the life-saving work of our Firefighters, EMTs, and Paramedics.”

Fire Dispatcher Christopher Orlando, 58, was one of the six members of the dispatching shift that was on that day when Ladder 111 came to the rescue of the two civilians trapped in their upstairs bathroom. The others who were recognized were Chief Dispatcher Patricia Wright and Dispatchers Ralph Eloi, John Abouricheh, Jennifer White, Theresa Romako and Shane Lugo.

In a phone interview, Mr. Orlando’s recounting of what happens when a “job” comes in from the city’s 911 system had the heart-pounding rhythm of a basketball team fast-breaking down court, but the dispatchers have one additional player.

Rotate Responsibilities

“There are six positions on the platforms, we call it,” Mr. Orlando said. “Everybody takes a rotation. One day you will be on the radio, the next day you are on the ARD taking the calls, and another day you will be on the ‘DD’ sending them out. Then there is the voice alarm, which actually makes notification.”

He continued, “The adrenaline starts pumping in the beginning and your body goes into that work mode and your minds pull together as a team, and it is a team effort. It is not just one dispatcher. It is a lot to take in at first…but it is really a team effort.”

“We get more information as we are speaking to the caller, but the trucks are already on the road rolling,” he said. “Then we can’t get the apartment the caller is in or the kind of building it is. But the crucial information is that address, between what two streets and what is on fire. That’s the crucial information.”

Mr. Orlando owes his FDNY career to the grounding of Trans World Airlines, his previous employer.

Friend: Take the Test

“I was out of a job and a friend of mine had been a dispatcher already on the job for five years, and he said the test was coming up and that I should take it,” he recalled. “I took the test in April of 2002 and I was hired Sept. 23, 2002.”

Mr. Orlando already had an affinity for the FDNY and firefighting.

“I always had a love for the Fire Department. My brother, retired Firefighter Gregory Orlando, had 35 years on the job; he was initially at Ladder 107, transferred to Ladder 85,” he said. “And I had 25 years as a member of the West Hamilton Beach Volunteer Fire Department.”

His tenure has bridged major changes in the way the city handles its massive 911 call volume. In 2009 the Bloomberg administration rolled out its controversial Unified Call Taking system that was part of its scandal-tainted $2-billion redesign of the city’s 911 system.

The UCT attempted to automate and streamline caller intake but in the process cut Fire Dispatchers out of interaction with the callers. The Uniformed Firefighters Association, the Uniformed Fire Officers Association and the Uniformed Alarm Dispatchers Association were adamant that the UCT was actually slowing response times and regularly generating incorrect addresses, sometimes with tragic consequences.

In October 2018, Mr. de Blasio returned to the protocol of immediately transferring all incoming 911 fire calls to the FDNY’s dispatchers, who were best able to help callers provide essential additional information.

Engaging the Callers

Mr. Orlando said there was no substitute for being able to engage the callers who often don’t have a strong fix on where they are. “Some people will call us up and say I am on Flatbush Ave. by the Target and they don’t know there are actually two Targets,” he said, adding that at that point the dispatcher has to ask callers to describe their surroundings.

And GPS and cell-phone technology are not foolproof, according to the veteran dispatcher. “A caller could be by the Barclays Center, where there are a couple of cell towers, and so their location” could be “five blocks, even a mile” from where the tower pings the signal. “We can’t just dispatch to that,” he said.

Though Fire Dispatchers are not actually fighting fires, they are not insulated from the emotional toll of a heart-wrenching tragedy.

Mr. Orlando described a shift in March 2015 that he still can’t shake. “The one that I remember was the one with the seven children that died…from the Jewish family that had left a hot plate on during the Sabbath, when they can’t touch electrical appliances,” he said. “At first we thought it was a dryer vent or something like that, but when the first unit got there… it was a working fire and all those children lost their lives.”

‘Did I Do Everything?’

He continued, “I went home that morning and watched my kids go to school and you sit there and say, ‘Did that really happen?’ You try to gather yourself and ask, ‘Did I do everything right? Maybe I should have done this or that or sent more companies.’ In the long run, we did exactly what we had to do. You don’t ever want to lose people.”

What Mr. Orlando appears to love most about his job is that, with over a million buildings to protect, “there is something always new to find out in such a big, complicated city. There’s just always new situations to learn and it’s like, ‘Wow I didn’t know that.’ ”

One minute it’s a multi-alarm house fire and the next it could be unimaginable mayhem. “I had a runaway train once that went through Queens into Brooklyn on the New York and Atlantic Railroad, part of the Long Island Rail Road,” he recalled. “The locomotive actually got loose and it was rolling down a couple of blocks into trucks and wound up hitting a truck with acetylene tanks on it and exploded. We have some kind of crazy situations.”

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