04/13/2026
Here’s a long one for ya today!
Did you know it’s National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week. This is the week where we spend extra time acknowledging the men and women who are first to respond to your call for help in your greatest hour of need.
To help make this week just a little more special, we’ve received help from a few of our community friends.
Rosco's Coney & Coffee
Up North Candle Depot
The Butcher's Wife
The Bird and The Bear Bakery - Roscommon
TJ Loopie's Sips & Sweets
Buccilli's Pizza of Houghton Lake
Prudenville Dairy Queen
Houghton Lake Ace Hardware
McDonald's
Legacy Handmade
Uncharted Grounds Coffee Shop
B2 Detailing
Simply Massage
Walmart
The Home Depot
In just the last 365 days, our dispatchers have handled 40,316 calls for service. Some days are harder than others. They arrive for their shifts often without knowing what waits for them. Somewhere in the hours ahead, the phone will ring, the alarms will blare and a voice will come through filled with panic or grief or the terrible quiet of someone who has run out of hope. 911 dispatchers sit at the intersection of ordinary life and its most catastrophic interruptions. They listen to things unfold right before them in real time, holding calm like a instrument they must never set down. And when that call ends…. Another begins.
Wow, that makes the job they do every day seem really heavy, and it is. But they sure do get to do a lot of other amazing things because 911 dispatchers are among the rare few who get to be present at the very moment a life is saved, even from miles away and through a telephone line. Things like when a frantic mother calls to tell us she is in labor and doesn’t think she can make the hospital. Her husband pulls into Houghton Lake Ambulance Authority only to run into their soon to be Grandma – Paramedic Mindy Hines, who was on duty that night and along with her partners Beth Benson and Donnie Burkett, were able to help deliver her new grandson.
They will stay on the line long enough to hear help arrive, and through the phone hear someone say They’re breathing, They’re breathing! – like that time our dispatchers were able to get information out to first responders on the road fast and accurate enough that it allowed the now Denton Township Police Chief Evan Thomas to perform early CPR along with the assistance shortly after of multiple EMS personnel, resulting in what is known as a CPR Save, that patient lived!
They are the calm that steadies a stranger in the most terrifying moment of that stranger's life, and that is no small thing to be. Occasionally a caller rings back just to say thank you, and those calls become something a dispatcher tucks away and returns to like a warm room on a cold night. They build deep, unshakeable bonds with the colleagues beside them, forged in shared pressure as well as shared success.
They know, in a way very few other professions ever get to experience or know, that — concretely, urgently, and with unmistakable consequence — they have mattered to another human being.
