Keith Herzig had a heart attack on April 14, 2022, and he rode in a Columbia Volunteer Fire Department ambulance from his home to Hartford Hospital, where they saved his life. Keith knew this ambulance well, as he had been a volunteer member for years of the Columbia department.
Herzig hadn’t felt well all day while he was working, and it was finally in the late afternoon that his wife convinced him they needed to call 911. If they had delayed or tried to drive him to the hospital themselves, he would’ve died.
These days Herzig finds himself on the other side of that telephone call, as he trains to become an emergency dispatcher at the Willimantic 911 Dispatch Center. He started in January and is currently training on fire calls. When he completes that, he will train on police calls.
Now 67, Herzig is juggling part-time dispatcher shifts with his regular 9-5 day job. But he is committed to the work.
“I’m not a sit-around kind of guy,” he says. “I was looking for a job change and I saw a friend who mentioned he worked at the dispatch center and they were looking for people.”
So he filled out the application and went through the interview process and was hired. Training consists of working with an on-duty dispatcher as calls come in to learn the system and how to respond to each emergency.
“When you take a 911 call, you have to paint a picture for those who will be responding,” he explains. “The caller could be screaming, they could be upset. You have to get the major details as quickly as possible so you can send the right help. I had no idea it was so complicated.”
Herzig doesn’t think his heart attack is what spurred him to pursue this new career path but he does think it makes him a better dispatcher. He thinks back to his own call, when he first insisted that he was just dehydrated to the dispatcher he was speaking with. “But then I told him I was having trouble breathing and he sent everyone,” Herzig says. “What I went through makes me better, I think.”