911 Dispatchers Revisit Brooklyn Park Plane Crash Tragedy
During an emergency, people are trained to call 911.
Those calls come into a Plymouth office building along Shenandoah Lane where public safety telecommunicators – also known as dispatchers — like Jayme Beerling are the ones who answer them.
Beerling has spent the last five years working as a dispatcher, putting in 12-hour shifts and taking up to 100 emergency calls a day.
“You can hit every single emotion within five minutes,” Beerling said. “You can hear a baby being born, to someone’s last moments. You never know what’s on the other end of the phone or the radio.”
It’s a critical role that requires months of training.
Dispatchers learn the computer system, the language, the geography and tips on how to stay calm.
“It’s not my emergency,” Beerling said, when asked about how she stays composed. “I’m in a climate-controlled environment with people I trust that have my back.”
Samaya Braatz is one of those people.
“I have always had a passion for wanting to help people,” said Braatz, a public safety telecommunicator with Hennepin County.
Braatz is several months into training for a job that she hopes will turn into a long-term career.
“They have been so supportive [of] me, and my training,” Braatz said of her coworkers. “I can go up to anybody and ask them for help and not feel ashamed for asking what could be a very simple question that I just don’t know.”
Samaya Braatz, a public safety telecommunicator, waits for a 911 call to come in.
March 29 Plane Crash
On March 29, their training was put to the test when a plane crash-landed onto a home in Brooklyn Park.
“I took roughly 10 calls about the airplane,” said Beerling. “The first one was a female telling me a plane fell out of the sky, and she, at that point, didn’t know it had landed on a house.”
During that incident, Beerling helped manage the phone calls, while Braatz went into an observer role.
All told, the dispatchers responded to 85 emergency calls during a five-minute time span.
“It was kind of like a controlled chaos in the room because everybody was getting those same phone calls, and that’s when the delegation started to happen of who’s covering what channels, who’s taking over what exactly,” said Braatz.
It was all in a day’s work for these “first, first responders,” who dedicate their lives to helping others on what could be their worst day.
“I like to think that I’m putting a lot of good karma into the world. And ultimately, I’m hoping I’m saving at least someone a day,” said Beerling.
“This is the best job that I’ve had,” said Braatz.
Dispatchers say the biggest piece of advice for anyone calling 911 is stay calm and know the exact address of the emergency.
Meanwhile, April 13-19 is also National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week. It’s a week set aside so everyone can acknowledge their hard work and dedication. Hennepin County has fun activities planned in the office all week as a way to thank their dispatchers.
Hennepin County’s emergency communications facility is located along Shenandoah Lane in Plymouth.
