The computer screens flashed red at Hennepin County’s emergency communications facility on the day a small plane crashed into a home in Brooklyn Park. The calls from neighbors were flooding in fast and furious.
“It was kind of a rush, just going from being on a nonemergency call to seeing every single main phone lit up,” said Samaya Braatz, a trainee who was working that day with a team of 10 Hennepin County public safety telecommunicators, sometimes referred to as dispatchers, who worked the emergency lines and mustered first responders.
Several in the group spoke to the Minnesota Star Tribune at the communications facility in Plymouth on Monday, a little more than a week since a single-engine turboprop aircraft hit the house near the intersection of Kyle Avenue N., Noble Parkway and N. West River Road in Brooklyn Park. Terry Dolan, the plane’s pilot and lone occupant, died in the crash on March 29. He was the vice chair and chief administration officer at U.S. Bank.
The family who lived in the house was not home when the plane crashed into it. There were no other injuries.
In the 5 minutes following the 12:20 p.m. crash, the telecommunicators responded to 85 emergency calls, according to Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Pafoua Lo. The telecommunicators said calls ranged from as short as 15 seconds to a few minutes.
When the calls come in, they appear as red notification boxes on screens. From the amount of boxes that popped up, Braatz said she could tell it was a major incident.
The telecommunicators are assisted by a program that will read aloud the comments they write and send to fire departments using an automated voice. Without that tool, telecommunicators would have had to manually page the five or six fire departments that responded to this crash, Stephanie McNeill said.
“That left me free to answer a few more calls and just say, ‘Help’s on the way,‘” said McNeill, who has 11 years of experience as a telecommunicator.
