I’m into my fourth week (or thereabouts) of allocating. I think I’m doing okay. I say this because no one has died as a result of my actions and none of the crews have put in an official complaint about me.

Today something somewhat out of the ordinary happened which tested my fledging allocating skills. If you were travelling by tube today, you might already be aware of it. There was some kind of signal failure on a tube (underground train) line leading to several trains being stuck in tunnels. London tube trains are very cramped and hot and a lot of the passengers are standing up, so when this happens you get a lot of people fainting, having panic attacks, shouting at each other and generally London Underground requested ambulances to four different tube stops, three of which were in my sector. So I had to dispatch three ambulances and two managers all at once, then deal with a constant barrage of reports on the radio from the ambulances, phone calls from the managers and updates from London Underground all whilst still having to give out “ordinary” calls from those inconsiderate members of the public who failed stop getting ill just because I had no vehicles left. I crossed my fingers tightly and prayed this wasn’t going to escalate into a major incident with lots of casualties and even more ambulances being needed… I knew my sector controller (who has been fantastic in helping me with allocating) would help me out, but I’ve reached the stage where I want to be able to do things myself and would feel disappointed if it all got too much for me to deal with.

Strangely, while I was dealing with the train incident, a call came in for a 25-year-old in cardiac arrest (believed to have died due to having an epileptic fit in his sleep). Beyond giving out the call and doing all the routine things to get the crew there, I hardly gave this a second thought. If I’d been call taking, this would a call that I would never forget and that I would be thinking about for weeks afterwards and the trains stuck in the tunnels would be instantly forgotten, but as an allocator, your priorities are different. The dead man was the responsibility of the crew and the call taker once I’d given the call out, but with the train incident I still had to make sure I was keeping abreast of what was going on, making sure my vehicles were in the right place and finding ways to cover my calls despite being three vehicles down.

Fortunately, the incident didn’t escalator. There was a lot of flitting about, but eventually two of the stations were stood down while London Underground evacuated people from one station first, then another. The crews were on hand to check people over but fortunately no one needed taking to hospital and everyone was stood down just as I left for the day. So the whole incident can be chalked up as a good practice for next time I have something big on my sector, when the outcome might be a lot worse…

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