Single-Staffed Mayday: Channel Control, a Patch Request, and a Domestic Still Running
23:40 on a Tuesday. You are the only telecommunicator on duty for a county of 41,000; your partner called in sick two hours ago. Fire has three companies at a working structure fire and is operating on Fire Tac 2. You are also holding two sheriff's units on a domestic in progress on the law channel, plus a queue of four non-emergency lines. On Fire Tac 2 a firefighter transmits a mayday - 'Mayday, mayday, floor collapsed, I'm trapped' - at the same moment another unit is transmitting a progress report. The state police duty officer calls the admin line asking to be patched to Fire Tac 2. Your CAD is working but slow, and the on-duty supervisor is off-site.
1. You have a mayday and a simultaneous progress report on the same channel. What exactly do you transmit, and why in that order?
Read the worked answer
Tight, in this order: 'All units on Fire Tac 2, emergency traffic - clear the channel for a mayday.' Then, directly to the caller: 'Unit calling mayday, dispatch - give me your unit ID and your location.'
Why this order: the goal in the first ten seconds is not information, it is channel control. If the progress report continues, the mayday is buried; if you open with a long question, two more units talk over a trapped firefighter. 'Emergency traffic' is the standard interrupt and tells every unit on the channel, including the one mid-report, that they must yield.
The second reason is silence. A long acknowledgment of your own costs you the receive window in which you might hear a PASS device, a voice, or the incident commander. Keep your transmissions under five seconds and stop talking. Write the mayday time on paper immediately - CAD is slow and the tape clock will not match your memory of the sequence.
2. The state police duty officer wants a console patch to Fire Tac 2. Grant, defer, or refuse - and why?
Read the worked answer
Defer, and say so plainly on the admin line: 'Fire Tac 2 has a mayday running; I cannot patch you into that channel. Give me a callback number and the reason, and I will pass it to fire command.' Take the number and hand it to the incident commander, who decides whether he has a free person to call.
Reasoning: a patch does not merely add a listener - it puts an outside agency onto the same talkgroup, with different radio discipline, cross-talk, and questions about locations, on a channel where a firefighter is trapped. It can mask the traffic that matters.
This is also a staffing judgment. You are one person with a mayday, a domestic in progress, and four non-emergency lines. A patch is a multi-step console task that takes your hands and eyes off the mayday, and nothing the state police need in the next two minutes is worth that. Later, when the mayday resolves, revisit the request rather than dropping it silently.
3. The domestic in progress and the four non-emergency lines are still waiting. What do you do with them, and what gets documented first?
Read the worked answer
Handle both, but not symmetrically. The domestic is a life-safety call with a named current danger; it cannot sit. Tell the deputies briefly on the law channel that you are working a fire mayday on another channel and may be slow to respond - that prevents them from assuming they have been abandoned and self-dispatching or calling each other. Then make Fire Tac 2 primary and let the domestic units work with what they already have, pulling back to them the moment the mayday resolves.
The four non-emergency lines go to callback or a recorded message if policy allows - not because they don't matter, but because 911 keeps arriving and you must keep a line free. Note any that carry a real deadline.
Documentation order: mayday time, unit, location, and your acknowledgment while it is fresh; the domestic times next; the non-emergency queue last. Also request the off-duty partner and a supervisor by phone. Single-staffing a mayday is the exposure that must be on the record before the shift ends.