The weekend of little sleep (12/24/04)

It’s always tough with a small staff to accommodate everyone’s holiday plans. That’s why, when police reporter Rachelle Haughn told me her family was having a Christmas celebration a week early, I agreed to take the pager for the weekend.

The pager — for those of you without family members in the fraternity of emergency workers, police, and firefighters — is a portable system that dispatches fire trucks, ambulances, and first responders.

It is also — in its own way — a sleep deprivation device.

Or it can be on a busy weekend.

That’s what we ran into earlier this month.

The newspaper keeps a pager so that we can dispatch a photographer or reporter when necessary. Deciding when it’s necessary, however, can be a judgment call.

Health-related ambulance runs, for example, don’t merit sending a photographer. Serious traffic accidents or house fires do.

Trouble is, when a call comes in the middle of the night, it’s tough to decide whether you should grab a camera and go or just roll over and go back to sleep.

There’s no simple rule of thumb, and it’s easy to guess wrongly.

Because the pager can be loud when it is activated — a series of beeps and boops and a vibration followed by the dispatcher’s voice — I tend to set the volume down low and leave it in the bathroom adjoining our bedroom. That way, I can hear it if something happens but it won’t be shouting in my ear.

On a Saturday night a couple of weeks back, I was just moving into serious sleep when firemen were paged out for a house fire on the west side of Portland. No problem. So what if it’s midnight and snowing, a housefire is a housefire. Our readers have come to expect photo coverage along with a complete report.

An easy call, but when I arrived at the scene, parking where I’d be safely out of the way, I found that the fire was contained to the attic. It had fortunately been discovered early, and firemen had been on the scene in time to get it quickly under control.

Good news for all concerned, but it didn’t translate into a photograph, so after about 25 minutes of standing around in the cold I went back to bed.

The next night the roads were getting slippery, and about 3:30 a.m. someone slid off into a field out near Salamonia. It wasn’t clear whether anyone was injured, so I stayed put. But the radio traffic didn’t stop.

And suddenly, from our bathroom in the middle of the night, I heard a voice I recognized. It was Lloyd Wright, a longtime Salamonia firefighter and one of my wife’s co-workers at Meshberger Brothers Stone.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I found it a little unnerving to hear Lloyd talking away in my bathroom in the wee small hours of the morning.

Fortunately, or unfortunately, someone else soon slid off a different section of county road and the Portland fire department and rescue units were paged out. That was close enough to home that I had to go.

Bundling up and taking the pager with me, I headed out, only to discover that my car was covered with ice and snow. After five minutes of scraping, I was finally on my way. The heater still wasn’t making much of a difference when the pager squawked again.

Everybody was OK. No injuries. No need for the fire department. No need for the rescue unit. No need for me to have gotten out of bed. No need to have cleaned my car windshield in the middle of the night.

The good news was that by the time I pulled back into the driveway, Lloyd and the Salamonia department had finished up and were calling it a night.

Now maybe all of us could get some sleep.[[In-content Ad]]