A NBC News investigation has found that many 911 centers around the country still rely on dated technology instead of something as widely used as Google maps, which means dispatchers may not be able to find you when it matters most. Experts call it a public safety crisis, stating that the majority of wireless calls to 911, some 60 percent of callers, cannot be located by emergency dispatchers.
Read it all and watch the whole chilling video report.
There are several things unsaid: the phone call to the 9-1-1 center lasted for 1 minute, 45 seconds. In this instance, the cell and 9-1-1 system was set up so that signals hitting particular cell tower were referred to the nearest community’s dispatch center. That happened to be a different city (in fact county, with another community in between) then where the incident was located. Some (and likely this) 9-1-1 centers have the ability to ask the phone where it is, but whether the phone was still operable in the time it would have taken to decide do this isn’t mentioned. Also not mentioned is if it took 20 minutes to find the location of the incident or of the vehicle. It’s all after-the-fact, but in reviewing this tragedy important distinctions to look at. Those are the human and system factors involved, there are also political ones.
Updating costs money, money from taxes. People don’t like to pay more taxes and don’t want what they already have cut to pay for updates. There are additional fees in some states that pay for enhanced 9-1-1, but while some of that goes to infrastructure, what 9-1-1 centers have found they need are more operators. Cell phone users flood 9-1-1 centers with calls for everything from garbage cans knocked over to cars parked with people waiting in them. Mobile communications are a blessing with a cost. As with so many other things, it would probably be a good idea to “follow the money” and see what you are getting for what you are paying.