A phone rings, and Guthrie County dispatcher Chuck Cleveland answers. What’s waiting on the other line could be anything, from a medical emergency to someone reporting a scam letter.

Day and night, there’s always someone at the Guthrie County Sheriff’s Office to answer the phone, and National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week honors personnel like Cleveland, who are in a sense the “first responder” in an emergency situation. Cleveland is nearing his 20th year as a full-time dispatcher. His wife Amy is also a full-time dispatcher for Guthrie County, and there are two other full-time and four part-time dispatchers. Cleveland shares what’s changed in the last two decades, “For our county it has gotten busier. When I first started there was a lot of, I don’t want to say downtime, but there were sometimes that we really didn’t have anything going on. Now with honestly the Des Moines (metro) encroaching over this way, we’ve gotten a lot busier to the point where we could run sometimes with two dispatchers.”

Cleveland says it’s not secretarial work, especially with the added jailer duties the dispatch staff has. While communicating with emergency medical services, fire departments, and law enforcement, they’re also administering medication and meals to inmates and trying to maintain a calm atmosphere. Cleveland adds, “It’s very stressful, some people say ‘Oh, it can’t be that hard, you just answer a phone.’ No, wrong, if it was that simple everybody would be wanting to do the job and it’s not.”

It’s gratifying work for Cleveland though, working with the fellow Sheriff’s Office staff and helping the public. You can hear more from Cleveland today in the second half of a two-part Let’s Talk Guthrie County program on air and at raccoonvalleyradio.com.