In an emergency, the 911 dispatch team at the Collier County Sheriff’s Office is literally the community’s lifeline. People that find themselves in dangerous situations can count on these heroes to listen to anxious callers, gather critical information and send targeted help right away.
Sitting at their computers with telephones and radios on hand, the 10 to 15 dispatchers on duty in each 12-hour shift can respond with lightning speed, sending firefighters to extinguish house blazes, emergency medical crews to resuscitate loved ones or police officers to stop crimes in progress. Dispatchers also serve as the voice of calm and reason, offering guidance when we are at our most vulnerable.
“I like being able to help people and the satisfaction that you get from knowing that someone needed help and you were able to help them,” says Dispatch Supervisor Shaunna Varaly. “We’re all working for a common goal. Whenever something happens, everybody pulls together and becomes one team trying to get the job done. Sometimes it has a good outcome, sometimes it doesn’t, but at least we were able to try and help them.”
According to Shaunna, the job can tug at the heartstrings. “You want to treat everybody like they are family, like it would be one of your loved ones that needs help,” she says. In her 15 years at this job, two calls stick with her. “I had a grandfather call because he found his 18-month-old granddaughter at the bottom of a pool. His wife had started CPR, so I helped them with directions. When they got to the hospital, their granddaughter was awake and breathing. The other call involved a girl riding an ATV. Her dad went out to check on her and found her underneath it, bleeding. They were in a remote area with smaller roads, making it difficult for the ambulance to reach them. By the time they were able to transport her, she had a pulse and was okay for a while, but unfortunately within the next day or so she passed away. I have kids, so for me the calls with kids hit me a little more than the other calls do.”
According to Shaunna, “If you’ve had a rough call, we have peer support counselors and the mental health unit at the sheriff’s office that we can talk to. We try to be there for each other and make sure that everybody is doing okay.”
After they hang up a call, a dispatcher may never know what happened to the people they were helping. “We may have been giving someone CPR instructions, and then they’re transported to the hospital and you’re wondering, ‘Did they make it, is there something else you could have done?’” Shaunna says. “Sometimes you call a deputy, or they call and tell you, ‘Hey, this is what happened. You did a good job. There wasn’t anything else that could have been done.’ Everybody works as a team. Whether they’re deputies, fire, EMS or the dispatchers, everybody helps to take care of everybody else.”
For more information or to apply to become a 911 dispatch operator, visit
CollierSheriff.org.