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GoogleDad is outside, pruning some low-hanging tree branches. Mom's in the kitchen, watching him through the window.
Suddenly, Mom sees Dad pause, clutching at his chest, face twisted in agony. As she watches in horror, Dad keels over into the rosebushes.
Mom grabs the phone, quickly dials 911, and in microseconds, the ambulance arrives in the nick of time to save Dad from a fatal heart attack. Fade to the hospital, where a doctor is telling Dad it's a good thing someone saw what was happening and called for help so quickly. Mom tearfully hugs the EMTs and thanks them for saving her husband's life.
Here's the way it sometimes happens in real life:
Dad is outside, pruning some low-hanging tree branches. Mom's in the kitchen, watching him through the window.
Suddenly, Mom sees Dad pause, clutching at his chest, face twisted in agony. As she watches in horror, Dad keels over into the rosebushes.
Mom grabs her cell phone, quickly dials 911, and spends the next 10 minutes explaining to the operator that she's in Marshall, Missouri, not Marshall, Texas, or Marshall, Minnesota, or Marshall, Illinois, or any of the other many towns named Marshall across the U.S., and needs help for her husband right away.
When Mom finally gets forwarded to the right 911 operator, she spends another 10 minutes explaining exactly where she is, "out on County Road 210, just past the Henderson house, about a quarter-mile down the lane near where the big tree got hit by lightning a couple of years ago."
By the time an ambulance arrives, another 10 minutes have passed.
Meanwhile, Dad is still in the rosebushes. If he was still alive, he'd be wondering why nobody has come to help him, but he's already beyond help.
As Saline County Jail Administrator Wilma Garrett pointed out a few years ago, before the formation of the E911 commission, "the public's perception of 911 service … doesn't match the reality."
Misrouted calls to 911 don't happen every day by any means. But they do happen. And if it's your life, or the life of someone you love that's hanging in the balance, it's all the more horrifying.
This is what is supposed to happen in Saline County:
Calls to 911 from within Marshall city limits from a land line phone are automatically routed to the police department.
If an emergency call is made on a land line phone with an 886 or 831 prefix, from outside Marshall city limits, the call is answered first at the Marshall Police Department and is then relayed to the sheriff's department. Emergency calls to 911 from all other parts of the county are supposed to be routed to the sheriff's department, too.
But these days, a lot of people have opted out of land line service and rely only on a cell phone. The decision to do that takes you out of the phone book and out of the view (for the most part) of telemarketers, which isn't entirely a bad thing.
But it also takes you out of the normal call routing for 911. And that definitely IS a bad thing, or it can be if you need to call 911, because of all calls made to that emergency number, the ones that generate the most problems with response and response times are those coming from cell phones.
Those calls, too, are supposed to be routed to the sheriff's department.
The key words, though, are "supposed to be." That's not always the way it happens.
It often depends on who your cell phone carrier is and how the call is routed
Two examples, one very recent, in Saline County illustrate the problem.
Garrett said there was a case in 2006 where a Blackburn resident called 911 and should have been routed to Saline County, but the call went to Lafayette County instead.
Pam Urtz, a Marshall woman who was one of the first on the scene in July's double-fatality accident on Salt Pond Avenue, got that harsh lesson when she called for help on her cell phone that day.
At first, she said, "I thought I had the local 911 dispatcher."
But when the dispatcher repeatedly asked her where she was, and didn't seem familiar with the street name, Urtz realized she wasn't talking to anyone in Saline County. It took several minutes to sort it out, while the two seriously-injured girls who initially survived the crash lay on the ground waiting for help.
Efforts to trace where Urtz's call actually went were unsuccessful. Her cell phone provider, AT&T, didn't know, and other 911 centers where Urtz thought it might have gone had no record of a call from her phone.
All that's certain is that the call did not go to a local 911 dispatcher, who could have summoned an ambulance much sooner.
"It would have made no difference (in the survival of the two teens who died)," Urtz said. "But time was wasted in getting help for the girl who survived."
The Federal Communications Commission estimates that as high as 30 percent of all calls now received at emergency 911 dispatch centers come from cell phones and the number is rising.
Pam Teague, director of Saline County E911, said Friday, Aug. 8, that when Phase II of the E911 plan is implemented, cell phone carriers will be notified and most calls, though still not all, from cell phones will go directly to the sheriff's department.
"There's been a lot of work done on that lately," Teague said. "Phase II, in a perfect world, will find a person within a 500-yard radius of where the call originates, but that phase is not yet operational in Saline County." Teague added that implementation of Phase II is at least two years away.
On the bright side, she said, "If you have a prepaid phone and you are out of minutes, it will still dial 911. Even if keys are locked on a regular cell phone, the phone will still dial 911."
She added, "Don't give your cell phone to your children to play with," says Teague. She reported she'd received many calls instigated by children playing with a cell phone.
The best way to call 911 is from a land line phone. But if you're in an emergency situation, and your only option for calling 911 is a cell phone, extra care is required on your part.
First, stay calm. That's important in any emergency, whether you're calling from a cell phone or a land line phone.
Second, clearly identify yourself and where you are. Be as specific as possible about your location.
Tell the operator you are calling from a cell phone, and give the operator your cell phone number.
Third, follow all directions the operator gives you.
More information about emergency calls from cell phones can be found at the FCC's Web site: http://www.fcc.gov/cgb/consumerfacts/wir...
Contact Kathy Fairchild at
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Fletch, you've raised an issue I hadn't thought about, although I should have. I formerly worked in a large corporate office, where it was necessary to dial '9' to get outside the company switchboard, followed by a '1' to make a long-distance call. More than once, dialing in a hurry, an employee mistakenly dialed 9-1-1, which resulted in a very rapid response by local emergency personnel, and a rather rough dressing-down by the responders. One employee was absolutely terrified when she was questioned closely and accused of doing it deliberately.
Although this is a problem for cell phones, users behind a Business PBX with multiple lines are also at risk.
60 million people a day spend their work hours inside commercial buildings, and many of these companies lack the proper facilities for these people to place a 9-1-1 call with any level of certainty. Due to this, many businesses try to block 9-1-1 calls entirely through system programming or policy just like the case noted in your story. The problem is that in many cases they only send the main building number which is problematic in large multi-story buildings and business campuses. This issue causes a lot of frustration for public safety and businesses may be threatened with fines for calls placed to 9-1-1 (habitually) where no emergency exists. VoIP adds additional complexity to the issue as workers may be in an entirely different state or country!
NENA, the National Emergency Number Association http://nena.org, has been taking steps to encourage legislation at the state level, but the fact of the matter is that very few states actually have 9-1-1 laws on the books requiring companies to implement any additional functionality in their telephone systems that would allow for a 9-1-1 dispatcher to obtain more accurate location information. There have been stories in the news over the years of people who have experienced significant delays in emergency services response, or worse yet actually died, due to telephone systems not having 911 implemented properly (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/20/AR2006042001923.html). Unfortunately this issue is rarely talked about, until there is a tragedy, but at that point it is far too late.
I suggest a follow up story on E9-1-1 for corporate telephone systems that highlights this problem, and the simple steps companies can take to remedy or improve their E9-1-1 capabilities.
Mark Fletcher
E911 Product Manager for Nortel
workingmom, most 911 centers employ dispatchers that are EMD certified to give you directions on what to do while ems, fire, or police are coming. But small towns don't have EMD dispatchers, marshall is one of them that does not. If i was to tell you pre-arrival instuctions such as cpr as a dispatcher i could be repremanded severely. EMD dispatching is just one PLUS of the new 911 center.
Someone could have died just waiting to get to the point of the article!
I have the traditional emergency numbers of the various Saline County agencies that I would usually use memorized and programmed in my cell phone for one number dialing. I feel a lot more at ease using one button to dial for fire, medical or police assistance if I need them. I would imagine that all of these agencies will maintain these numbers after the E911 system is in full operation and it at least gives you nearly fool-proof access to the help you may need.
slater41: One important thing to remember is that at this time, there is no way for the 911 operator to "see" where the caller is. That's why it's so important to be as precise as possible in describing your location. Even when they *can* see the caller's location, there may be mixed results. A 500-yard radius is 1,500 feet, more than a quarter of a mile, which might include, for example, several blocks of apartment buildings in a city, or dormitory buildings in a college town. If the caller is unable to be specific, finding him/her would be very difficult.
As I read this article I began to wonder if the area code in the number associated with the cell phone being used for the emergency call impedes the 911 operator when determining the location of the caller.
As to the highway traveler needing emergency assistance, I can only imagine how frustrating that can be for both parties.
I have an alarm system installed in my house, and the main panel has three buttons - one for the alarm company, one for the police, and one for ambulance service. My land line is through an Internet phone service, which works about like the cell phone when dialing 911, so we're probably not much better off than the cell phone user calling for help.
The situation reported by Ms. Fairchild is an example of how certain technology advances create unintended consequences - Uh-oh! How do we work our way out of this one?
I have to say that I have unfortunately had the opportunity to dial 911 and we live in the country-- the 911 operator offered no assistance as far as how to deal with my blue non breathing child -- luckily my child started breathing on their own-- but when I asked the 911 operator what to do she just said "wait for the ambulance" and then hung up-- note that it showed up quickly for us living a ways out of town-- but aren't the operators supposed to help you not just dispatch an ambulance?