For every selfish motorist who blocks a fire hydrant. there’s a plucky FDNY dispatcher whose institutional knowledge of New York City’s neighborhoods saves the day.
Such was the case last week when a Fire Department dispatcher calmly guided a rescue crew to a remote wooded area in Brookfield Park on Staten Island where an 18-year-old got stuck in about 3 feet of mud while walking two dogs with his sister.
Although it was firefighters from Engine 165 and Ladder 85 that ultimately made the rescue, it was a trio of calm dispatchers that did the heavy lifting and got them to the right place.
“I’m familiar with the area,” said Fire Alarm Dispatcher Frank Festa, 32, who took the 911 call before getting help from his supervisor, Matt Scullin, 46.
The call came into their work station across the street from the MetroTech FDNY Headquarters in downtown Brooklyn. But, as luck would have it, both dispatchers just so happen to live on Staten Island.
“I’m not as familiar with the area as Matt is,” Festa said. “But I have been on the trail, yeah.”
Under normal circumstances, Festa wouldn’t even have gotten the call.
“There’s a system to how it works,” Festa explained at a news conference near the rescue site on Wednesday. “So, basically, Staten Island has one call-taker. So, if that call-taker is busy, the calls can’t not go anywhere. They have to go somewhere. So they’ll bounce to Brooklyn. So the call-taker on Staten Island happened to be on another call, so I was the Brooklyn call-taker. It bounced to me. The call always goes somewhere. That’s how it landed on my desk.”
Festa said a woman on the other end of the line frantically described how they got lost on a trail while walking their dogs, and that her brother was stuck in mud at around 7:30 p.m. Thursday as darkness descended on the woods.
“They tried to take a shortcut, and they got themselves in a situation,” Scullin said. “Just fortunately, the two of us, both of us being borough residents and using these areas, we knew exactly where they were.
“My sister-in-law, Leslie, actually just had us up there in the fall for a family hike,” Scullin added. “So we just took a walk up through those woods not too long ago.”
The dispatchers managed to keep the caller and her brother calm while directing firefighters to a street corner that had easy access to the wooded area for one fire company to walk in through. The dispatchers could also hear the company’s sirens through the caller’s phone to let them know the rescue team was getting close.
When firefighters arrived, they found the teen stuck thigh-high in some deep, muddy water.
“He had his dog and he couldn’t move,” one of the rescuers, Firefighter Michael O’Halloran, 50, said. “So we had to go in there and help him out. He was very nervous. He was scared, and he was scared for his dog also. He didn’t want to let his dog go, but we had to take the dog from him to get him up. And he was stuck. He was stuck in there pretty good.”
FDNY Commissioner Robert Tucker said he has a soft spot for Fire Department dispatchers. Tucker can trace his FDNY roots back to the early 1980s, when, during his first-ever job as a summer intern in the department, he fetched coffee and mapped fires across the five boroughs while working in the dispatchers’ office.
“Make no mistake about it,” Tucker said, “our fire-alarm dispatchers are an integral part of the life-saving missions of the FDNY, and often our unsung heroes that don’t get the attention that they deserve. But I’m very proud of the work that they do.”
The kudos were a nice contrast to recent reports of motorists blocking fire hydrants with their cars, hindering firefighting efforts.
Tucker said he relished an emergency with a happy ending.
“This call is a great example of the amazing institutional knowledge that our fire-alarm dispatchers and fire companies have,” Tucker sad. “The FDNY is in your communities every single day, and we cannot stress how important our community activity is when we are there. It literally saves lives.”