Ideas to mitigate risk of 911 calls being misdirected

[moonman239]

So, everyone knows that sometimes a 911 call can be routed to the wrong call center when you're calling from a cellphone. Well, I have a few ideas as to ways of keeping response times as high as possible.

1) Route all 911 calls to an operator who works for the user's carrier. If the user provides no location, the operator will call the closest 911 call centers. So if you see or have a medical emergency on the border of, say, New Mexico and Texas, the operator will hopefully see based on the data given by your cell phone that you are at least close to the border, and call the NM state police and the TX state troopers.

2) Have all cities & towns work with the county and state they are in and with neighboring cities and towns and states. Also have all counties work with neighboring counties and the state as well as neighboring states Further, have each state work with neighboring states.
Then, if a caller says there's an accident at 620 Central Ave, but the jurisdiction whose 911 call center the call was routed to does not recognize the address, the address and incident can be stored in a database of calls which is sorted by priority so that an operator at a neighboring call center who recognized the address can send help.

 

[berkeman]

Many areas have improved their 9-1-1 handling of cell phone calls significantly over the past few years. I'm impressed by the 9-1-1 cell phone call responses that I see here in my area (Northern California, including Santa Clara County and Alameda County).

I recently e-mailed the supervisor of my city's Dispatch Center (a person that I know from some activities that we are both involved in) to ask about what seemed to me to be new capabilities that our city had in receiving 9-1-1 cell phone calls. His response is very interesting. Especially the part where he said *he* dials 9-1-1 on his personal cell phone, instead of using the direct-dial numbers for Dispatch that emergency responders have!

We upgraded our phone system in 2006 in anticipation of the wireless upgrade and started to receive wireless 9-1-1 calls directly in 2007 as each of the carriers reached that level of capability. In our city we activated each carrier as soon as possible. Other agencies opted to hold off on major carriers because of the expected call volume increase. At that time, if the pattern of coverage contained a freeway segment it went directly to CHP, so it was still hit and miss for those events in areas near highways 84 and 880.

CHP spent quite a bit of time and effort in the last couple of years working with the local agencies plotting the calls received from each antenna on each cellular tower. We did that for each cell carrier in order to see which agency received the majority of calls from each antenna. That cleaned the system up quite a bit. I still have the 7 digit emergency numbers in my cell phone, but in the Bay Area I now would use 9-1-1 first.

And of course smarter phones with GPS chips make the system work even better. The next challenge is being able to accept digital messages from cell phones. We are looking at upgrading our 9-1-1 system as soon as there is a standard developed as each carrier seems to handle those differently. At that time, probably a couple of years away, we would start receiving 9-1-1 texts and even videos from cell phones. I foresee challenges in my future!