When a winter storm struck in the early 1990s, dumping snow and exasperating the Puget Sound region, a Kitsap County Sheriff's Office repeater tower on Gold Mountain went dark, leaving communities like Kingston, Olalla and Seabeck out of contact.
Dean Heistand, now technical system supervisor for Kitsap's 911 service, CenCom, strapped tools and test equipment onto his back, snowshoes on his feet and went trekking up the mountain with a deputy to bring the tower back to life.
"We had no business doing this," Heistand, 61, said Friday in his office at CenCom, were he has worked for 41 years with the technical systems that make emergency dispatching possible. "It was crazy."
Hired to work at CenCom before it had taken a call, even before 911 service existed in Kitsap, Heistand will retire next week. His career spans the worlds of analog and digital and was spent bringing Kitsap into the future.
"It's a lot different," he said Friday.
Linda Ficarra, CenCom's first dispatcher who retired in 2007 as a supervisor, watched the brave new digital world develop as well.
"It went from everything being written down on paper to everything electronic," she said. "It was night and day."
She can recall when dispatchers would test the tensile strength of their headset cords by trying to reach the Teletype machine so they could run warrant checks, as well as inserting a series of punch cards to send the tones over the airwaves to summon the right fire station.
And woe to the dispatcher who erred in parsing the blurry lines between jurisdictions.
"Heaven forbid if you a send a fire department to a call not in their district," Ficarra said.