It's National Public Safety Telecommunications Week!! Share your 911 stories

[nolabear]

or just give a shout-out.

I don't know why but I have a bunch of family members (four at last count) who are or have been 911 operators. It's a crazy job with crazy hours, the pay is absurd and they save lives every single day without ever being seen and with many people's anger at the police being erroneously aimed at them.

I suppose my most personal and heartbreaking 911 story comes out of Hurricane Katrina. My sister is a 911 operator in upstate Miss., and when the systems on the coast went down the calls there were rerouted to other places, including hers. Since they too were having storm problems and TV outages and couldn't leave the building, they had little idea what was going on minute to minute. People would call her from attics, cars, God knows where, and plead for help, and she had to tell them that no one could get to them, and try to figure out where they were. Then she'd call me up here in the Pacific Northwest and I'd tell her what I was seeing on CNN and other news channels. Since they had sent officers down to the coast in anticipation of the storm, not realizing how bad it would be, they had no idea who was alive or where they might be. She and I talked for days about how traumatic it was, but she kept on going and going, doing what she could, as they all did.

The officers survived, btw, though the building they were in was destroyed and they literally made it by strapping themselves to trees, as a surprising number of people did. She has no idea to this day how many people who called her were ever rescued.

So here's to 911. They do indeed have your back.