Before there was American Idol, before there was Dancing with the Stars, before there was Big Brother, Survivor and The Bachelor, the reporters in the WSB Traffic Center had a front row seat to the most real reality show ever. Your lives.
We hear when your home gets burglarized. We hear when you get pulled over for speeding. We hear when your car breaks down and we hear when you get in a fight with your neighbor. Surrounded by a huge bank of police, fire and rescue scanners we in the traffic center listen to a daily audio ballet of your lives.
Visitors to the traffic center often become unnerved by the constant chatter of the scanners. For those of us who call it our work place, it is simply part of the job. Like a jack-hammer operator who isn’t bothered by the sound of his instrument or the flag man on the tarmac at Hartsfield-Jackson, the noise is just part of the gig.
Unfortunately most of what we hear on the scanners is bad news. Heart attacks, car crashes, stabbings and shootings are all heard way too often. But sometimes, we hear good news. The birth of a baby. A peaceful end to a standoff. A lost child recovered.
Sometimes we hear things that defy logic. Jason Durden, reporter for WSB-TV’s NewsChopper 2 and long time scanner-head, recalls hearing a police call about a man being attacked by another man with a frozen squirrel. Yes folks, a frozen squirrel.
Before it becomes a story on television, radio and in the newspaper, we hear about it first in the WSB Traffic Center.
Most breaking news stories start in the traffic center. We will hear a call on the police or fire scanner. From there we pass the information that we know along to the news desks at WSB Radio, WSB-TV and the AJC. Often Captain Herb Emory can get to the scene in the sky before and reporters can get there on the ground. It’s at this point we become news reporters instead of traffic reporters. Whether it’s a large structure fire, a high-speed police chase or an officer-involved shooting, the story usually starts in the traffic center, is then picked up by Captain Herb, and then handed off to a reporter on the ground.
Working in the pool of sound that the scanners provide does have its disadvantages. Our ears are now trained to tune out chatter that we know isn’t important. We perk up when we hear calls for fires, crashes and trees down, but our brains know to ignore benign calls like traffic stops. This unfortunately spills over into our private lives. Subconsciously our brains will often tune out someone talking to us when we don’t think that the information is useful. So don’t be offended if I ask you to repeat yourself, my brain just processed what you were saying as scanner traffic.
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