BUTLER TWP — Thick skin, fast fingers and a big heart.

Those aren’t exactly the qualifications that appear in a help wanted ad for a Butler County 911 dispatcher. But a person could not perform the job without them.

“Sometimes it’s hard to keep the mother in me from kicking in,” said six-year dispatching veteran Tracie Nanna of Harmony of her reaction to calls the Butler County Communications

Center receives.

Nanna is one of 16 full-time and 12 part-time dispatchers who staff the Butler County Emergency Dispatch Center around the clock.

Collectively, the dispatchers will answer more than 122,000 calls for some kind of help this year alone.

Some of those calls will be heartbreakers.

Others will merit a smile.

But not a day will go by without stress.

Car accidents. Domestic fights. Cell phone callers who don’t know where they are driving.

They are all on the list of possible calls.

On Sept. 17, 2004, county 911 dispatchers took more than 700 calls in less than 24 hours in relation to the flooding the county experienced from the rainy remnants of Hurricane Ivan.“You think you have heard it all, and then there is something new,” said 12-year dispatcher Jeff Grazier of West Sunbury.Most of the county’s dispatchers, like Grazier, have backgrounds in emergency services such as fire, paramedic or police experience.Before they are hired, dispatchers are quizzed on their knowledge of the county, emergency services and their response time to given commands.Dispatchers also must be certified by the state and earn Emergency Medical Dispatch certifications to work for the county.Frank Matis, the county emergency services director, explains it’s one thing to know how to assist a person until help arrives. It’s another to try to describe that help to another person on the telephone.And many people in the community aren’t really sure who is on the other end of the line when they dial 911. Callers sometimes believe they are speaking directly to the police, medical or fire services.“You’ve been here before,” callers will say to a 911 dispatcher.Yet what’s really at the 911 center, which has been housed in the basement of Sunnyview Nursing Home since 1970, is a complex series of telephones, computers and dispatchers.“We are the middlemen,” Grazier said.

For every one incoming call, two dispatchers go to work.One dispatcher takes the incoming information and prepares the caller to handle the situation until help arrives.At the same time, the incoming information is zapped to a second dispatcher, who alerts the proper authorities.“What you hear on the scanner is about 10 percent of what goes on here,” said Matis, himself a dispatcher for 10 years before becoming an administrator.The county’s emergency dispatch system just underwent a massive radio system upgrade. The county is planning to move the operation from the basement of the county-owned nursing home to a new facility.But, Matis said neither upgrade affects the public or dispatchers’ bottom- line function: Get help to those who need it.It’s no secret that there are many residents who frequently listen to the emergency scanner as a hobby.“People live and breathe it,” Matis admits. “They want to know what is going on in their community.”And some of what the listeners hear might be deemed entertaining.Take for example the man who called last year for police help when he handcuffed his wife, then lost the keys.

Or there was a time a dog stepped on one of those automatic dial gizmos and called emergency dispatchers.But unfortunately, much of what happens at the 911 center is tragic.Matis, for example, took the emergency call about 10 years ago when his father had a heart attack and died.Dispatchers have listened to people who committed suicide while on the telephone.As for Nanna, “The calls about children are the hardest … You go out and smoke a cigarette, and you come back. Everyone in here will support you, because everyone in here has been through it.”Grazier said at first the calls can be difficult, but “You become seasoned.”Despite the high stress activities, only a few of the 50 people who apply every year to become a county dispatcher will get the job, which starts at $15 an hour.More than likely those people will spend years as a part-timer before gaining full-time status.“We just don’t have a high turnover here,” Matis said.