We Evacuated the Center for Four Hours

The painters got there in the evening of Monday, July 21st and began to move everything into the middle of the room, draping all the consoles and equipment with plastic. They worked around the dispatchers until the last minute before we moved out into the carport to keep working.

Both dispatchers on duty suggested they simply let the painters drape plastic over THEM as well, because they were a bit concerned about leaving their radios and phones to go work off one phone line and the two patrol cars in the carport. Nobody took them seriously, thank god.

I arrived at the magic hour of 3 a.m. to connect the alternate phone line out in the carport, notify allied agencies we were gonna do this thing NOW and to staff "the phone position" on the trunk of one patrol car. The dispatchers got to sit in the cars and talk on the radios, with heaters on and buttons to push....

It was late July and a nice, warm night. We had dressed in layers, but it wasn't chilly at all. The field sergeant watched in amazement while we did our thing, and after we got set up and took our first couple of calls without difficulty, she made a brief run to bring us some donuts. Is that cool, or what? One long phone line stretched across the carport, a stack of dispatch cards and some maps on the trunk of a car, two dispatchers sitting in patrol units -- without TOO MANY playful activations of the light bars -- AND DONUTS too?

We chose the "traditionally" slowest time for our Center: between 0300 and 0600 hours, and luckily, this proved to be the case once again.

At one point, I had to sneak back into the Radio Room to get a resource book we'd forgotten to bring outside to the Interim Carport Operations Center, and this is how the inside looked like at that stage.

Sittin' in de cars, dispatchin'