Kate Luedke fell into a career helping people in traumatic situations.
There were few options available in Kimball when she was a mother of small children seeking an interesting job she could juggle with her family obligations.
“From the second I started I loved it,” Luedke said. “So, I worked really, really hard to be able to keep doing it. “
She spent three years dispatching in Kimball, and five years at the State Patrol in Omaha, before coming to Seward County 15 years ago. A decade ago, she expanded her skills by training to be a Nebraska Telecommunication Emergency Response Team (TERT) member.
For two weeks in October, she pulled all her experience, training and commitment together to provide respite for the 911 dispatchers in Asheville, North Carolina, who had been working throughout Hurricane Helene and its aftermath, as well as working to help their own families and neighbors.
The Asheville dispatchers needed time away from their jobs after the Category 4 hurricane brought wind and flooding through western North Carolina, to date claiming 96 lives.
Luedke joined three other Nebraska dispatchers – Cindy from Scotts Bluff County, and Mike and Andrew from Lincoln – to spend Oct. 4 to Oct. 18 answering the 911 phones in Asheville. The area was without water and other services.
They were warned they would have to be self-sustaining for up to three days, so Luedke prepared by packing boots, leather gloves, a meal kit and other emergency gear, and renewing her Tetanus shot.
“We were very excited to get down there and totally exhausted on the way back,” Luedke said.
At first, they slept on air mattresses in a school gymnasium with neither working plumbing nor hot water and a seven-minute walk to work their 12-hour shifts. When the school began cleaning up to resume classes, they were moved to a Federal Emergency Management Agency semi tractor trailer set-up that provided 12 small “rooms” where individuals could keep a bag and climb into a little better bed, and access portable showers and hot water.
Thirty-six trailers like theirs were provided for the dispatchers, firefighters, first responders and utility workers who had come to help in the area where evacuees were sheltered.
“It was very military,” Luedke said. But they took the conditions in stride because they were there to take care of others.
“Part of my job is being able to get resources where they need to be. To do that, I need to have a good grasp on geography and I had none,” she said.
She and the other Nebraskans had to learn a few of the landmarks people referenced and hone their interviewing skills to get the information they needed from people on the phone.
A bigger challenge was the technological differences in the dispatch operations. While radios and phones were similar to those used here, Luedke said the computer assisted dispatch (CAD) system used in North Carolina features a “plain speech” language base rather than the 10-code system Nebraska dispatchers use.
The work in this community of more than 300,000 people was challenging.
“Every day was very busy,” she said.
The common emergency calls involving domestic disputes, thefts, and health emergencies continued, and the storm-related emergency calls were on top of that workload.
The goal was to give each of the local dispatchers a few days off to take care of their families and property, and hopefully rest. This meant there would be three TERT dispatchers working with one local dispatcher there for guidance.
“The local dispatchers were just exhausted. They said they weren’t, but they just had to be,” Luedke said.
Many days were emotionally challenging, too.
Luedke was working the phones during a particularly trying time when utility workers found some bodies in a heavily damaged area. They dispatched rescue and recovery teams with dogs and soon learned that the 11 people killed in the area were members of one of the Asheville dispatcher’s family.
On another call, Luedke tried to comfort an older woman who was searching for her son and wondered if she should provide his prison identification information in addition to other identifying information.
“It was breaking my heart,” Luedke said. “I think she thought nobody was going to go looking for him because he had been in prison.”
She assured the mother that rescue and recovery teams were looking for everyone.
The work was physically and emotionally challenging, and the options to rest were few, but Luedke said she will be ready to answer the call again.
“The dispatchers are people and dealing with the disaster and just keep coming back. The fact that they did that – they are just so tough,” she said.
During the storm, especially, it was hard.
“They said the phones just rang and rang and rang until all the lines were on hold,” she said.
At one point, they could not send rescuers out, which is a different kind of stress.
The dispatchers, Luedke said, “are reaching beyond their own power.”
Luedke had one day off before getting back to her own job in Seward, but her TERT boots and other equipment are ready to go when she is called again.
The TERT program was created after 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, when people saw the challenges emergency workers faced as they worked to help people in their communities and their own families, Luedke said.
Nebraska is one of 17 states to have deployable teams of dispatchers trained and ready to go. Luedke said Ohio’s team has its own bus equipped to dispatch wherever needed. The four dispatchers were the first Nebraska team to make an out-of-state TERT trip.
