Dispatcher here, working a college town of approx 50k permanent residents. We've had a state of disaster declared twice this year.
It's not unheard of to have only one dispatcher working the floor. Seeing something like this leaves me with questions though. Most comm centers have systems in place that forward an unanswered 911 call to somebody who can answer. In my case, if for whatever reason we cannot answer, it gets transferred to county.
That aside...
If people knew about the working conditions of the average dispatcher, they'd be genuinely appalled. The hours are brutal, the accountability is immense, and the pay is nowhere near enough to entice seasoned, veteran dispatcher to stay. Most dispatchers are seen as administrative assistants and glorified secretaries. City managers and the general public don't realize that we don't just answer calls. Answering calls is probably 20% of the job.
Fortunately in my PSAP, there is an absolute minimum of 3 dispatchers on the floor at any given moment. Normally we have 4 to cover the 4 'jobs' on the floor - radio, phones, NLETS and fire/EMS. Even with the work split up, we all stay busy for the vast majority of the 10 hour shift.
Depending on whatever's happening, we can quickly get bogged down.
Let's say there's an active burglary of habitation in progress. Calltaker is on the line with the victim getting information, creating the call in our CAD (computer aided dispatch). Our radio operator is relaying this information to the officers out on the field and adding any information they call out over the radio. Our NLETS operator is standing by to run any kind of investigative work the officers request. This is usually running a person by name and date of birth to check for NCIC warrants, local warrants, running a criminal history rap sheet, things of that nature. If we're unlucky, we'll end up knee deep in investigative work, doing things like finding info through possible social media, checking for associations to other people, finding everybody who has ever owned a certain vehicle, determining the name, phone number and any vehicles owned by an individual based solely on an address, etc. When one position is tied up, another free position is supposed to assist the other.
All of this happens for one call while 6 other calls for service may be on the screen at once.
Mistakes like the ones in this article happen occasionally because dispatchers are human. My question is the following: What happened to the backup systems to prevent this kind of thing from happening?