JOY POWELL; STAFF WRITER, STAR TRIBUNE (Mpls.-St. Paul)

As more consumers ditch land lines for the convenience and lower costs of cellphones, they risk being left out of the loop for emergency notifications.

The recorded “robocalls” came from the Washington County Sheriff’s Office, urging St. Paul Park residents to go to their basements. A gunman was holed up in their neighborhood, shooting from a window that August night.

While most of those calls went to people with land-line phones, many residents who rely only on cellphones missed out.

That is a growing challenge for those who work with emergency message systems.

“The only way, if you have a cellphone, that you’re going to be notified … is if you register your cell phone [number] through CodeRED,” Washington County Sheriff Bill Hutton said.

CodeRED, new to Washington County and used in St. Paul, Dakota County and elsewhere, enables local government officials to record, send and track messages and alerts to thousands of citizens in minutes.

But one in four adults in Minnesota and Wisconsin households now use only cellphones, statistics show. Many of those users don’t automatically get the benefits available to land-line users. So the Washington County Sheriff’s Office is among public safety agencies nationwide that are urging cell users to register numbers so they, too, can be notified.

CodeRED’s system involves downloading two land-line-based 911 databases into the emergency notification system, said Cmdr. Doug Anschutz of the Sheriff’s Office. There’s no centralized database for cellphone numbers, hence the problem.

The system enables residents to get messages ranging from community notices of car burglaries in an area to missing-child alerts and weather warnings.

“It’s a great resource and tool for public safety to keep citizens notified in a very efficient manner,” Anschutz said.

Consumers’ ever-increasing move toward cellphones brings advantages for public safety — such as 911 calls from accident scenes — but it also poses challenges, emergency notification among them.

Cells are tough to nail down

More and more cellphone numbers are not linked to a particular geographical area, said Dr. Stephen Blumberg, a senior scientist at the National Center for Health Statistics, part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That can challenge 911 dispatchers who are trying to pinpoint where a call originates.

“There’s a drawback in that a cellphone isn’t going to give us a specific address,” Anschutz said. “It’ll give us a general location, and depending on the cell service or cell company, it may give us more specific grid coordinates, but it isn’t going to give us a hard address like a land line is going to give.”

About seven out of 10 emergency calls are now coming from cellphones, Anschutz and Hutton said.

Blumberg expects the challenges to grow as cell-only users increase in the years ahead.

“There are many countries in Europe where the proportion of households that are wireless-only exceeds 50 percent, and it’s not going to surprise me if in a few years we’re there,” Blumberg said.

“At 30 percent and growing 2 to 3 percentage points every six months, it won’t surprise me if we are at 35 percent [nationally] by the end of the year,” he said. “… In many cases these are young adults who have been living on their own and have never had a land-line phone.”

It’s a personal choice for people to ditch land lines, Hutton said, but they should understand the limitations.

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