Review - USA Today Article on 911
On August 18, 2009 the national newspaper USA Today ran a story headlined, "Cellphones Problematic for 911." The story contained information and quotes from industry experts that seemed to justify the headline, but which is many respects was completely misleading or inaccurate, resulting in a story that doesn't portray the state of today's emergency communications network. Read the full story here.
Here is a major review the article, nearly line-by-line, explaining where the story misses the mark. Quotes from persons mentioned in the article might have been taken out of context, edited or otherwise mangled by the reporter. Even so, I've chosen to rebut the quotes as stated. The commentary is set indented in the text below.
-- Gary Allen, Editor
Darlene Dukes struggled to speak as she called 911 from her cellphone. She could barely tell the operator her address: 602 Wales Drive.
The operator, trying to understand Dukes, sent an ambulance to Wells Street in Atlanta— 28 miles from Dukes' apartment in Johns Creek, a suburb north of the city.
The Dukes incident is very different from what is portrayed, and vastly more far-reaching. Twelve-year dispatcher Gina Conteh was fired for mishandling the incident, and the investigation revealed she had a 2,100-page personnel record full of disciplinary incidents that included fights, sleeping on the job and mishandling other incidents. The incident sparked the resignation of comm center director Alfred Moore and a general shake-up of the comm center's management and operations. Even Conteh and her attorney claimed during an appeal hearing that poor training, mismanagement and other issues specific to Atlanta's center are to blame for the response delay, not the "911 system." So Ms. Dukes' death is not an example of any shortcoming of the 911 telephone system or wireless 911, but rather of a single person or single comm center.
Dukes' case is like many others across the nation. For the millions of Americans giving up their land lines in favor of cellphones, dialing 911 may no longer mean a quick response. It can lead to misrouted calls, delayed information about the location of the caller and, most important, a slower emergency response.
Actually, the Dukes case is only like "several" others across the nation, involving the specific behavior of one dispatcher, or problems at the center. But, indeed, among the millions of wireless 911 calls made during an ordinary day, there are "many" where the 911 system does not provide the calltaker with an accurate location. However, in almost every single one of those calls, the person calling can provide his/her location, or at least enough information to pinpoint the location. For the remaining calls, passersby, witnesses or other information is sufficient to locate the caller. So in an ordinary day, a very small number of wireless 911 calls are left unlocated.
"Lots of people are dying each year," says David Aylward, director of Comcare Emergency Response Alliance, a non-profit advocacy group. "We're sending in responders where they don't know information about the person they are responding to. We're sending them in looking for someone when they should know where they are exactly."
Actually, about 2.4 million Americans die each year from various causes, but it's not known how "many" die from dispatcher mistakes or response delays--fewer than 100 a year, fewer than 50? The fact that dispatchers are sending emergency units to incidents "where they don't know information" comes more from the circumstances of the incident than from any problems with the 911 system. Many calls are made by passersby who can't fully see the incident, misinterpret what they do see, or simply decline to answer the calltaker's questions. Where they is telephone service and a willing witness, information is obtained and passed along to the responding field units.
The nation's 911 emergency response system, built in 1967, was based on the expectation that calls for help would come from land-line telephones, says Paul Linnee, a consultant for emergency communications. Now, with more people using cellphones exclusively, calls that bounce from tower to tower pose significant challenges.
Actually, the first 911 call was made in 1968 (thanks, Haleyville, Ala.), and the concept was developed in the years before that--1967? And of course, the "expectation" mentioned was because that's all they had at the time…wired telephone systems. Today's 911 systems were "built" much more recently than 1967, and in fact new systems are being installed every week. So the circuits, switches and other hardware of the nation's 911 systems are much newer than 1967, or even 1968. As for the increased use of cellular phones, the challenges have very little to do with "calls that bounce." In fact, calls do not bounce. Instead, cellular calls carried on radio signals that are received by the tower that receives the strongest signal--that may not be the closest tower. This phenomena of physics can't be easily fixed, and comm centers live with the result--the 911 call that is received may be from a distant point not handled by the comm center. The significant challenge, then, is to determine the jurisdiction of the incident, which is always an issue, no matter how the call is received.
Cellphone users "almost assume that they are going to be located — and that's not a fair assumption," says Brian Fontes, CEO of the National Emergency Number Association (NENA), which focuses on 911 emergency communications.
So it's really the "assumption" of cellular 911 callers that is at issue, not the 911 system itself, Fontes seems to say. If that's true, NENA's task would be to change the assumption of callers through a program of public education, urging them to be more proactive in knowing their location when dialing 911 from wired or wireless, and being more descriptive about where the incident is located.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that 20.2% of U.S. households had only wireless phones in 2008, up almost 3 percentage points from 2007. Today, the Federal Communications Commission estimates a third of 911 calls are from cellphones.
Indeed, more people are using their cellular phones as a primary telecommunications device, and ending their wired telephone service. That points up even more dramatically the need to educate the public about the limitations--imposed by physics--on cellular 911 calling. As for the number of wireless 911 calls, it is definitely between 30% and 50% for most agencies.
Linnee says even the most advanced 911 systems do not allow a dispatcher to get a specific street address for a wireless call. About 93% of the nation's 911 centers have technology that lets the dispatcher immediately see the caller's phone number and the location of the cell tower that picks up the call. But the dispatcher must request the caller's GPS coordinates from the wireless carrier that operates the tower. This process can take several seconds and may yield a location as far as 300 meters from the caller, not much help in a high-rise apartment.
The reason that even the "most advanced" 911 systems don't show an address for a call is not really related to the 911 system. Instead, it's related to the mapping systems that have been developed (or not) by local jurisdictions. There are few agencies who have geofile systems that can convert latitude and longitude to a physical address by comparing the lat-lon to the exact location of property lines. Perhaps in coming years, geofile development will allow such a feature.
The rest of this paragraph is a mixed-up set of confusion. Yes, 93% of PSAPs have Phase I, which displays the caller's phone number and the location of the receiving antenna tower. For those agencies, even telephoning the carrier might not reveal the caller's "GPS coordinate," since not all carriers have selected GPS technology to meet the FCC's wireless 911 rules. The reference to "several seconds" is confusing. The reference to a "300 meters" inaccuracy is misleading, since even if the location were perfectly accurate, it would be of no help in locating a caller within a multi-story building—Phase II provides no height component to the dispatcher.
Cellphone calls are commonly misrouted to the wrong 911 center, a problem not addressed by the FCC. In Jefferson County, N.Y., just across Lake Ontario from Canada, Joseph Plummer, director of the county's fire and emergency management, says dispatchers occasionally get calls from Canada.
Unlike land-line calls, which are sent to the 911 center for their jurisdiction, wireless calls can hit the wrong tower, further slowing the response.
Misrouting also happens in metropolitan areas where multiple jurisdictions are bunched together. In Cook County, Ill., there are more than 100 different 911 centers, Linnee says, making it extremely common for calls to hit towers outside of the proper jurisdiction.
First, cellular 911 calls are not "misrouted." There is no "routing" of a wireless signal between the cellular handset and an antenna--the signal simply travels outward and is received by various antennas. The fact that it's received by one tower or another is completely beyond the control of today's technology. Indeed, the FCC didn't address this problem, because it's not something that can be addressed by administrative regulations. Instead, the FCC left it to the cellular companies to devise solutions, and the best is that calls are routed to a PSAP--somewhere--and a human dispatcher then evaluates the location for the proper jurisdiction. It's a system that works very well. Perhaps in the future, there will be a way to better route 911 calls to the proper agency.
As for wireless 911 calls hitting the "wrong tower," again, this is mis-stating how radio signals are transmitted. There are no "right" or "wrong" towers. But, yes, reaching a PSAP that does not handle the jurisdiction of the emergency does require a transfer, and that might add time to the handling of the call.
Lastly, Cook County and other metro regions must contend with wireless 911 calls that cross jurisdictional lines. But as mentioned several times, this is physics and not related to the 911 system.
Problems run deeper still in areas where wireless carriers and 911 centers have not adopted the latest technologies. According to NENA, 7% of the nation's 911 centers are able to obtain only the location of the tower that picks up the wireless call and are not equipped to request GPS coordinates for the caller's location. More than 100 counties still have only this so-called Basic 911 service. Cellphone callers in these counties are unlikely to summon emergency services unless they can orally tell the operator where they are.
This paragraph restates the same statistic as mentioned before, but this time as the number of PSAPs without Phase I. But it confuses Basic 911 with Phase I/II, saying 100 counties still don't have "Basic 911" service. As for cellular callers being required to "orally tell the operator where they are," that's really the core purpose of the telephone connection--not a disadvantage--and works in all but a handful of incidents a day (or week).
Improvements are coming, however. This month, a 911 center in Waterloo, Iowa, serving Black Hawk County, became the first in the country with the capacity to receive text messages.
Indeed, improvements are coming, but they have no connection to the implementation of texting to the 911 number in Waterloo County. The county took the unilateral step of creating a system whereby customers of a single carrier, and who are within the county can send a 160-character message directly to a dispatcher. This technology has not been standardized or endorsed, and most industry professionals discourage texting 911, and urge dialing 911 on a voice telephone. Instead, improvements are coming mostly in the form of IP-based telephone systems, which can provide more sophisticated features and interconnect with other PSAPs to allow call transfers, load balancing and disaster recovery.
Last week, NENA announced the formation of a consortium of emergency response organizations and wireless experts to secure federal stimulus funds to upgrade 911 operations by using broadband technology. Patrick Halley, director of government affairs for NENA, says the goal is to allow callers to send video and text messages to 911 centers.
Apparently the doom-and-gloom view of the nation's 911 systems is being promoted in order to obtain funding through the federal program to improve the nation's broadband networks. Sadly, the fed program didn't include any specific mention of assistance for public safety communications. So public safety communications groups and associations are drawing their own connection between Next Generation 911 (NG911) and the federal broadband grant program, all to justify receiving grant money.
In the year since Dukes' death, the town where she lived, Johns Creek, has partnered with the neighboring town of Sandy Springs to install a joint 911 center, says Noah Reiter, assistant city manager for Sandy Springs. The new $3.5 million system, partly inspired by Dukes' death, will launch Sept. 1.
While this may read as a neat ending to the story, you have to ask several questions about why, in the midst of an economic down-turn, would two towns withdraw from the existing Fulton County comm center, spend $5.5 million to create the Chattahoochee River 911 Authority, and then build, equip and staff its own 911 center (it even has an official logo). In this case, the two towns have contracted with iXP Corp. to handle the entire process, essentially creating a privately-run comm center, a rarely-implemented concept. Being private, they have declined to divulge dispatcher pay rates, and have publicly said the center will be "performance based," and that "people who don’t pass muster won’t be around long." The statements seem to indicate that it won't be operated like the Fulton County center. In fact, both cities were originally part of unincorporated Fulton County, and had a long-time dissatisfaction with Fulton County government. They became separate cities in 2005 and 2006, and have been forming their own government operations since then, most of them contracted out to private companies. The 911 center is the latest project in that series, so was not "partly inspired" by the Dukes' incident. Instead, the Dukes' incident may have provided additional justification for the change.
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