Ask a room full of dispatchers what they'd do if the dam upstream of their jurisdiction failed right now. You'll get silence, then some version of "notify the supervisor" or "look it up." Neither of those is wrong. Both of them are too slow.
A dam failure notification can come in as a phone call from a dam safety engineer using terminology your dispatcher has never heard. "Sunny day failure." "Uncontrolled seepage." "EAP Level 3 activation." These phrases have specific, consequential meanings that drive evacuation decisions, and they'll arrive at the dispatch console with no context, no visual, and no time to Google them.
The infrastructure training gap is everywhere
This isn't just a dam problem. It's a critical infrastructure problem. The same gap exists for pipelines, chemical storage facilities, rail corridors, power generation sites, and any other regulated facility that's required to file an emergency action plan with the local jurisdiction.
The pattern is always the same: the plan exists, the facility files it, the jurisdiction acknowledges receipt, and nobody trains the dispatchers on it. Then the facility has an event, the first notification call arrives at the comm center, and the dispatcher is encountering the plan's concepts for the first time during a live infrastructure emergency.
On June 10, 1999, the Olympic Pipeline ruptured in Bellingham, Washington. A quarter-million gallons of gasoline poured into Whatcom Creek. Ninety minutes passed between the pipeline company's SCADA alarm and the first 911 call. Three people died, two of them children.
On December 14, 2005, the Taum Sauk reservoir's upper dam failed catastrophically at 5:12am, sending a billion gallons of water down Proffit Mountain into the East Fork of the Black River. The Johnson's Shut-Ins State Park superintendent and his family were in the direct inundation path.
In both cases, emergency action plans existed. In both cases, the comm center was the critical link in the notification chain. In both cases, the dispatch training gap was invisible until the infrastructure failed.
Why this matters more than you think
Infrastructure incidents are low-frequency, high-consequence events. That's precisely the category where 911 training matters most - because your dispatchers will have no experiential reference when it happens. They won't have "the last time" to draw from. They'll have whatever you put in front of them before the call came in.
If what you put in front of them was nothing, that's what they'll have to work with.
The Before the Call Infrastructure Training Series was built to close this exact gap. Real infrastructure incidents, real EAP concepts, dispatch perspective. Free to use in your center.