911 Dispatcher Takes Call About House Fire, Only to Realize It's Her Own. Here's What Happened Next.
Marisa Anderson wasn’t prepared for the 911 call that would change her life.
911 dispatchers are accustomed to taking frantic calls from people in the midst of grave emergencies. One of the expectations of the job is being able to stay calm and collected in order to talk callers through a traumatic experience, guiding them to safety. However, dispatchers are probably not trained for situations when the caller on the other end of the line is a family member and the call has to do with an emergency impacting them.
This exact scenario recently unfolded in Wisconsin when a 911 dispatcher received a call that their own house was on fire. Continue reading to discover her reaction and the subsequent events that unfolded.
Marisa Anderson, a dispatcher in Door County, Wisconsin, was working a morning shift when she answered the phone. "Door County 911, what is the address of your emergency?" Anderson said.
The caller yelled, "Mom!" over and over again. But it took a moment for Anderson to reveal that the caller was calling her "mom" and that it was her son, Landon, 12.
"There's flames in the backyard, Mom!" Landon says in the call recording provided by the Door County Sheriff's Office.
"It's up in flames," Landon said, according to the recording. "What is up in flames?" she responded. "The house!" Landon said. He then told her that he and his sister, Emma, 17, had evacuated.
"Hold on," Anderson told her children. "Mom will be there soon." She informed her supervisor of the situation and drove to her home. It wasn't until she reached her house that she realized how bad the fire actually was.
Flames destroyed most of the home, killing her pets, which included four cats, three dogs, and a rabbit. She is now staying at a nearby hotel with her children.
"I don't know that everything has fully set in because I keep just thinking I can go home," she told The Washington Post. "It's difficult to walk in my house and see everything burned and charred and smell terrible from the smoke."
"The house wasn't perfect by any means," Anderson said. "But it was ours." Almost all their belongings were destroyed and the family has created an online fundraiser to help get them back on their feet. "Honestly," Anderson said, "we just want to go home."
