I bet I've taken 200 calls about the power being out. It's been unreal.

That has to make for a miserable night. What does the utility company expect you to do?

We, the county sheriffs dept, also dispatch for their police dept. Because the police dept is also their after hours contact for public service emergencies such as power outages and water outages and flooding, etc, they call us.

It makes for a wild evening when something like this evening happens. The storm was fairly small, but concentrated. It took down trees and shut down power for about 3 mile circle, and I mean ALL power. Every single transformer went out. not to mention most roads were closed due to trees down, they had to saw their way through to fix the transformers.

I would have to change that. The utility company needs to pony up and have a contact line. 200+ calls for a power outage into a dispatch center on top of normal and 911 calls is a public safety problem. If they want to do that they need to pay the salary for a couple of dispatchers to make up for the volume and hassel.

You're telling me.. I was on the phone with a guy that didn't know his address, and all he could tell me was "I don't know". There was a lot of yelling in the background, I had to raise my voice so he could hear me, and I look around and the Major, second in command of the whole dept, is standing right behind me. This was going on at the same time, 911 lines going off, 6 phone lines ringing off the hook plus two radio channels. Good times....

Hopefully the major will take the initiative and make a call to the utility company tommorow.

That storm effectively shut down our dispatch center because it took both of us answering calls for a solid hour, one after the other, and we couldn't take time to listen for radio traffic without deputies calling us at least twice. That is dangerous right there.

But this problem has come up before, and we've always worked around it like we did this time. It'll stay that way until someone gets hurt because of the high volume of calls taking away from the sheriffs office and then it'll get changed.

Flippy

Hey guys, just getting caught up on my reading. Y'all been doin a little posting I see.

Just a little LOL