One Gallatin County dispatcher is not only being rewarded for taking important calls but most of them. Andrew Greer has been awarded Telecommunicator of the Year. He takes a lot of calls and always starts each call with the same question.
“Where are you?" Greer said. "If they're calling me on the 911 line, where are you? Because I can't do anything if I don't know where you are.”
He won Telecommunicator of the Year in Gallatin County because of how many calls he has taken. Greer won this award because last year he overall took 12,700 calls. 755 of those were medical and 824 were fire related.
“In ski season, we get the skiers and they're like, you know, they always call 911 accidentally because they're trying to turn the volume up, and summer it's more the fires,” Greer said. “There's different kinds of calls. There's different kinds of things that keep popping up more and more, and the first time you see those, it hits you hard.”
He says his most memorable calls are the ones where people cooperate and help save lives.
“The gal called me and she was with a patient and the patient was not doing well, which is why she called us," Greer said. "She was just a fantastic reporting party. She was just great. She was ready to go, ready to do anything that was asked of her, and we got going and we got some stuff and we had the deputies just right out there with the medics.”
So why does he love his job?
“It goes from like nothing to everything's firing and you've got your brains going," Greer said. "You're trying to problem solve and get your coworkers to help you out and think of what you can do to fix the situation while being in a nice bulletproof, climate-controlled room.”
