Cellphone Calls to 9-1-1 Pose Problems When Dispatchers Can’t Find Location
Jessica C. Wray, Ventura County Star (Calif.)
WASHINGTON – Emergency calls made from cellphones can delay first responders if callers don’t know where they are or can’t say it. That’s because locating a cellphone caller hinges on a number of factors – any of which can hinder fire or police trying to provide assistance.
At a briefing this week, the Find Me 9-1-1 Coalition, a group of first responders, 9-1-1 dispatchers and others interested in emergency notification, said cellphone carriers and 9-1-1 call centers need to make finding people calling from cellphones easier.
Under existing Federal Communications Commission requirements, cellphone carriers provide dispatch centers with the telephone number of the 9-1-1 caller and the location of the cell site or cellphone tower – generally accurate to within 50 to 300 meters.
The coalition says the technology for locating a person’s position precisely – be it in a high-rise office building, apartment complex or on the ground – has been created, but needs to be adopted by cellphone carriers and 9-1-1 call centers.
There also has been a decline in the accuracy of some location information from phone companies over five years in five areas – San Francisco, San Jose, Pasadena, Bakersfield and Ventura County, according to a letter and report that the California’s National Emergency Number Association sent last month to the FCC.
Danita Crombach, the CalNENA president who also is communications manager for the Ventura County Sheriff’s Office, signed the letter.
“In our business, we say seconds save lives,” Crombach said at the briefing in Washington, D.C. “And if you talk to medical directors for counties and states, they’ll tell you how important just six seconds are.”
She said dispatchers often must ask for additional location information from carriers. In some instances, if callers have had a stroke and cannot talk, for example, or they don’t know their location, the information provided by cellphone carriers is crucial.
When a 9-1-1 call comes in, cellphone carriers send location information to a third party that a dispatch center can patch into to retrieve the location information. But, typically, all the dispatch center gets is the cellphone number and a cell tower location.
Dispatchers then have the ability, after 10 to 20 seconds, to “rebid,” or ask the computer system for more precise information while they are still on the phone with a caller. It’s often up to the local dispatch centers to decide when the rebid takes place and how many times they will ask for updated information.
Verizon Wireless filed a letter with the FCC on Wednesday, saying CalNENA’s data is skewed – that the numbers don’t consider instances when callers give dispatchers their locations or the calls don’t last long enough for the dispatcher to submit a rebid.
Don Brittingham, Verizon’s vice president of national security and public safety policy, said the CalNENA study of five of the state’s call centers provides an “incomplete picture on the performance of 9-1-1 today.”
Brittingham said Verizon’s data show that dispatchers in those five California areas received accurate location information 91 percent to 95 percent of the time – significantly higher than the 57 percent CalNENA’s study shows.
Cellphone carriers point to a lack of rebidding on the dispatcher’s part as a reason for CalNENA’s data. Crombach said the call-takers want to see the location information come in without having to ask.
Another problem is locating a wireless caller from inside a building or in a densely populated area.
Crombach said the public expects dispatchers to know where they are, but that’s currently not the case. Landline phones usually provide this information, but a third of American households no longer have landline phones.
The FCC estimates that 70 percent of the 240 million 9-1-1 calls placed each year are from a wireless phones, and that about half of those wireless calls are made from indoors.
Jamie Barnett, who is with the with the Find Me 9-1-1 Coalition and was chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, said at the briefing, “We can be doing better than we’re doing right now.”
He told a story about a father inside a building who called 9-1-1 from his cellphone about a baby in distress.
“He didn’t speak English. And it took 16 minutes for them to find where he was,” he said. “In that particular situation – and there were a lot of other things – maybe it wasn’t the 16 minutes, but the baby passed away.”
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