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The alarm
that went out over the Civil Defense radio on a Sunday evening nearly 38
years ago, as thunder and lighting ripped through the region, was not
routine, even for veteran Cecil County firefighters.
Stationhouse clocks ticked unhurriedly toward 9 p.m. on December 8, 1963,
when emergency airwaves suddenly crackled with the urgent message:
"Station 3 [Elkton] you have a plane crash," the steady,
professional voice of Rosemary Culley, the dispatcher at the control center,
said.
Following the
first report that a large craft had "exploded and gone down in flames,"
every phone in the dispatch center started ringing off the hook, recalls
Culley. While answering those lines and handling communications with a number
of agencies that were going into action, Culley coordinated the response of
Elkton's Singerly Fire Company.
Listening to the decades-old tape of communications that night, it rapidly
becomes obvious that this was a major catastrophe. Chief Edgar Slaughter, who
was leading his men to the scene to search for survivors and put out fires,
called in many times asking for more information, more help and more
equipment. Within minutes of the first alert, Culley put out a general alarm:
"All available ambulances respond to a plane crash at Delancy Road in
Elkton."
The Cecil County Control Center was pulsating with information coming in and
going out. Though just a couple of minutes had lapsed, urgent voices were
beginning to call "fire headquarters" on the radio asking for this
or that. On the wall of the radio room, the clock ticked on.
This horrifying explosion and crash of the Pan American Airways Boeing 707 in
a dark Maryland cornfield is the most serious disaster in the history of
Cecil County. All 81 persons aboard the craft perished that stormy night.
It's disasters like this that the two-year-old central alarm system was
designed to help coordinate. That night, as the magnitude of the catastrophe
revealed itself all too quickly, Culley juggled communications with dozens of
fire and ambulance units, police agencies, federal investigators and military
authorities. The control center, for the first time, provided the means to
professionally coordinate a massive response to a disaster of this magnitude.
This network had its start in 1954. That year, Civil Defense installed
two-way radios in fire stations and apparatus. All parts of the county were
linked together "in the event of an enemy attack, a fire or other
disaster" by these units, John J. Ward, director of Civil Defense, told
newspapers.
Seven years later, the county established a centralized dispatching system.
On a Monday (October 2, 1961), operators began working around the clock to
take calls, Culley recalled. "There were five of us -- Jack Cook, Jim
Penhollow, Marie Colling and Bob Ebersole -- each one working a shift."
Before that autumn day, each of the county's nine volunteer fire companies
took its own calls. Someone reporting an emergency would talk with the
telephone operator, the toll collector at the bridge in Perryville, the
funeral home or a person with an emergency phone in their home, depending on
the town.
With the start of "fire headquarters," the Cecil County Civil
Defense Agency began taking all fire calls. The on-duty operator determined
the location of the emergency, alerted the appropriate station on the radio,
triggered the siren and coordinated the response of units.
In the decades to come, "fire headquarters" handled other major
disasters. Forty-one wrecked railroad cars shooting flames hundreds of feet
into the air in Elkton on October 31, 1965; the massive pileup of vehicles on
the John F. Kennedy Memorial Highway in a dense unmoving fog on October 2,
1968, requiring ambulances from two-states; Tropical Storm Agnes' near
hurricane-force winds and torrential rain, forcing the evacuation of Port
Deposit in June 1972; and the downtown explosion in Perryville on July 6,
1991, are some Culley talks about.
To more efficiently speed help in urgent situations, a 911-call center was
set up at "headquarters" in 1978. With implementation of the
universal number on January 9 of that year, Cecil became the sixth county in
Maryland to provide three digits for reporting any type of emergency.
Back in 1962, when "headquarters" completed its first 12 months of
operation, it had handled 804 fire calls and 785 ambulance dispatches. Last
year, the emergency dispatchers, who now work two stories below the county
office building, handled 56,201 911 calls and 11,376 fire and ambulance
incidents, according to Mike Brown, deputy director of the Department of
Emergency Services, the agency that now manages the communications center.
Today, the center is two stories below the county office building. Day and
night, reports of emergencies pour through its phone lines. For the
dispatchers, it's a world of troubles they handle, one filled with car
wrecks, domestic disturbances, heart attacks, fights, fires and violence.
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