For 26 years, dispatcher Debra Lusk has been a steady, reassuring voice for often frantic callers in the North Little Rock area reporting a fire, an overturned vehicle or a burglar in their home.
"North Little Rock 911. Do you have an emergency?" Lusk answers to caller after caller at the North Little Rock 911 Communications Center, 1206 Sycamore St., during her 2-10 p.m. shift. She proceeds to gather the vital information that first responders will need, and she works to calm an excited, often scared, voice on the other end of the call.
"No. 1 is to find out the location of the person calling and what's going on," said Lusk, who has 31 years of experience as an emergency operator, working her first five years as a Little Rock Police Department dispatcher. "Then everything else falls into place: their name and phone number, who's involved, if there are any weapons or intoxicants involved."
When Lusk's shift ends tonight, she will hang up her headset for the final time. Lusk, 58, is retiring after three decades of answering emergency calls, with plans to return to school to get a degree "while I'm still a little bit young." A celebration of her career was held Friday at the 911 center.
Her 31 years as an emergency dispatcher are well beyond the norm for such a stressful job, based on national statistics about emergency dispatchers, said Rick Ezell, North Little Rock's emergency management coordinator and formerly director at the city's 911 Communications Center for 11 years.
"Out of 100 that go into the job of dispatching, less than five make it to 20-year retirement because it's a very stressful occupation," said Ezell, who will retire March 15 after a 44-year career in public safety. "You catch callers at their worst sometimes. They can be very upset and emotional. There's so much information a dispatcher will have to get and they have to calm [the caller] down."
Not all emergencies are the same, and dispatchers must be able to respond to each situation, such as assisting a calling child or providing CPR instructions. For a burglary in progress, Lusk said, a dispatcher wants to keep a caller on the phone until an officer arrives.
"If there's a burglary in progress, they [the caller] could be in the house with the burglar," she said. "We want to know their location in the house and if they can tell where the location of the noises are coming from. They're in danger because somebody is in their house. We want to keep constant contact with them to make sure they're safe.
"We try to talk to them and get them calmed down," she added. "And you have to keep your stress level down. You have to stay calm no matter what's happened."
Leeann Sadler, a 911 dispatcher for North Little Rock who has 16 years of experience, said Lusk is "so low key" when doing her job.
"You can never tell if she's got something that's so urgent," Sadler said. "She's always kept her cool."
Being a 911 dispatcher is so demanding that even police officers and others who receive information from dispatchers often can't comprehend the demands of the job, North Little Rock Police Chief Mike Davis said.
"They're down here and we have no clue what's happening," Davis said of officers interacting with a 911 dispatcher. "We're trying to get information we need and they're down here getting 65 cellphone calls on one accident. You've got to be a very patient person to be able to do this job."
The North Little Rock 911 Communications Center has five openings, said Leonard Montgomery, the city's new emergency management/911 director and a retired North Little Rock police captain. Each shift has four to six dispatchers. Being understaffed is a "chronic problem" nationally, he said, because of the demands of the job and difficulty in finding qualified applicants.
With cellphones becoming so common, the pressures on a 911 dispatcher have only increased, Ezell said.
"Years ago when people would see an accident, we might get three, four or five calls," Ezell said. "With cellphones, particularly with an accident on the interstate, we might get 100 calls. And every call has to be addressed because it might be another emergency in the middle of that."
Lusk's ability to handle the pressure may stem from her family dynamic. Her husband, Robert Lusk, is retired from the Little Rock Police Department. Daughter Courtney Hagar is a paramedic, and son Bo Hagar is with the Little Rock Fire Department. Both of her parents were in law enforcement, and her grandfather was a North Little Rock firefighter. A brother and sister-in-law are both North Little Rock police officers.
Lusk said she first wanted to become a police officer in Little Rock but that her poor vision prevented it.
"They laughed and said you can't even see with your glasses on," she said. "That didn't work out, so I applied for dispatcher and got on with them."
After 31 years, Lusk said taking off her headset one last time will "be bittersweet."
"This has been my family," she said. "I've worked many a day and many hours. There's no such thing as a holiday here. This has been home for me."
Metro on 01/31/2016