Dispatcher Must Send Fire Crews To Her Own Home, Loses Everything

SUFFOLK, VA — Dispatchers like Barbara Hughes are accustomed to sending first responders to emergencies like fires with professional detachment. It’s their job to remain calm in an emergency. But panic set in last week when Hughes was working an overnight shift and tending to the fire channel at the 9-1-1 Operations Center in Suffolk, Virginia.

The fire call at 1:28 a.m. on Jan. 3 was in Hughes’ neighborhood. Her sense of trepidation quickly turned to full-blown fear: The fire wasn’t just in the area where she lived, but at her home. Hughes dispatched the call, then left her shift to another dispatcher as she rushed home, thinking about the three small dogs trapped inside her house.

When Hughes got there, here home was fully engulfed in flames. Once the blaze was contained, there was nothing firefighters could do but comfort the woman who has alerted them to countless other fires until her son, an off-duty police officer, arrived to take over.

The dogs didn’t make it out alive. Hughes’ home is a total loss. She walked away from the rubble with nothing beyond her vehicle, the clothes she was wearing and the few personal items she had at the dispatch center.

Her colleagues have started a crowdfunding campaign on GoFundMe to help her put her life back together. Dispatchers put out heartbreaking calls almost every shift, they noted, but rarely have to send responders to their own homes.

“Barbara Hughes is not just a dispatcher, she is our family, our friend, and a community hero for what she does on a daily basis,” they wrote. “In this family we fight together, and we take care of our own. And, at times like this sometimes even a hero needs a hero. …

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“Any little bit helps and would help piece her broken heart back together,” they wrote. “Together, we can all be heroes for Dispatcher Hughes.”

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