NEWS

911 cell callers can be tough to find

JEFF MURRAY
  • FINDINGS:
  • Emergency responders have difficulty locating a 911 cell caller within about 300 feet, which can be a serious problem in a city or building.
  • Federal regulations relating to 911 call have not kept up with shift from land lines to cell phones.
  • A plan by the wireless industry to improve cell phone 911 calls may be weaker than proposed FCC regulations.

To most people, a call to 911 is one of those absolute securities — punch three digits into the phone, and help is on the way.

But, as cellphones continue to replace traditional landlines everywhere, emergency responders are having a tough time finding those cellular callers, particularly when the request for assistance comes from indoors or urban areas.

Life-saving minutes — and, in some reported cases, hours — can be lost as responders try to pinpoint the source of a 911 call. While the technology can get responders within just over 300 feet of the cell, that distance can be too much for a speedy response in apartment buildings or in dense cities.

With about 70 percent of the nation’s 911 calls now coming from cells, according to the Federal Communications Commission, responders everywhere are discovering this potentially fatal flaw in a reporting system designed for landline telephones.

The FCC is considering new regulations to make locating emergency cellphone calls quicker and easier, while the wireless industry is pushing its own reform plan that detractors say doesn’t go nearly far enough.

“There can be challenges,” Dana Smith, Dutchess County Emergency Response coordinator, said Wednesday. “Anything that can improve caller location accuracy is a good thing. We are fortunate in Dutchess, in the rural areas our cellular reception is not 100 percent, but it is pretty close compared to other rural areas in the state.”

The new regulations will be helpful in emergency situations such as finding lost or injured hikers, Smith said.

A U.S. Census Bureau survey found that 97 percent of all households had a landline in 1992. By 2011, that percentage had plunged to 71 percent.

At the Dutchess 911 Center, 70 percent of calls came from a cell phone in 2014, Smith said.

Smith recommends callers use either cell phone or landline, whichever is readily available to them in an emergency.

“If we can approve the accuracy of where they are that will improve the response,” Smith said.

The technical limitation of about 300 feet can be daunting.

NBC News reported on a June 2013 incident in which a woman who lived in an apartment on the upper east side of Manhattan had a stroke. She was able to call 911, but her speech was slurred and she couldn’t tell the dispatcher where she was.

Because she was inside a high-rise, the location information provided by the cell tower was not accurate. Finding her took nearly eight hours. She was still alive when medics arrived, and she was rushed to the hospital, NBC News reported.

Urban areas in the mid-Hudson Valley aren’t as dense as Manhattan, but pinpointing 911 cellphone calls in population centers can still involve some guessing.

“New regulations designed to improve the accuracy, it is also designed to address the vertical potential of a 911 caller’s location,” Smith said. “In Dutchess, that does apply to some high rise buildings. A call at 122 Broadway on the street vs. the 80th floor at 122 Broadway is very different.”

Technology is slowly catching up with changes in cellphone use, and government regulators are trying to keep up.

The FCC earlier this year proposed regulations to require cellphone carriers to provide more precise caller locations as technology allows.

“Making sure we can quickly and accurately pinpoint where 911 calls are coming from is critical for public safety and security, and we must make these location-based services as strong as possible as soon as possible,” said U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

The FCC proposes that wireless providers meet interim location accuracy metrics that would be sufficient to identify the building for most indoor calls.

The commission also proposes that wireless providers deliver vertical location information that would enable first responders to identify the floor level for most calls from multistory buildings.

In the long term, the FCC wants to develop accuracy standards that would require identification of the specific room, office or apartment where a wireless 911 call is made.

Wireless carriers aren’t waiting for the FCC to put its new regulations in place.

A coalition of cellular communications companies, including Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile, working with the Association of Public Safety Communications Officials and the National Emergency Number Association, two industry lobbying groups, recently announced its own plan to improve 911 indoor location accuracy.

“This agreement builds on well-defined core principles that are key to an effective location information solution. It enables the public safety community to benefit as innovations and new technologies come online,” said Kathleen Grillo, Verizon senior vice president of federal regulatory affairs, in a statement. “And it’s a clear and realistic road map of achievable goals aimed at locating wireless 911 callers indoors and outdoors as quickly and accurately as possible.”

But the plan offered up by the wireless industry is a diluted version of the proposed FCC regulations and really wouldn’t improve location accuracy, at least not in the short term, said Jamie Barnett, executive director of the Find Me 911 Coalition, a nationwide group made up of more than 200,000 emergency responders, 911 dispatchers and law enforcement officials.

“The FCC proposed rules to require carriers within two years to provide location within 50 meters indoors 67 percent of the time, and in five years be able to do it with 80 percent of calls,” he said. “Carriers are now trying to do an end run. They said they want to create benchmarks, but when you analyze it, it would only require them to have location accuracy for 13 percent of calls, not 67 percent.

“It pretty much lets carriers off the hook for years,” Barnett said. “We hope the FCC will see through this bogus agreement and adopt their own rules.”

While federal regulators and wireless industry leaders battle, emergency responders are doing what they can with existing technology.

Emergency dispatchers follow a script when 911 calls come in, according to Dutchess County’s Smith.

When a landline call comes in, the operator will ask the caller to verify the location information that shows up on a computer screen.

When the operator sees the call is coming from a cell phone, they will attempt to pinpoint the caller’s location as soon as possible, Smith said.

Most of the time, existing technology is sufficient, even if callers can’t verify their exact location.

“Per current FCC regulations, cell phones provide location information in two phases,” Smith said. “The first provides the callers cell number and the cell tower location,” Smith said. “The second phase, starts later, giving the caller’s approximate location within a range of generally within 50 to 300 meters. With today’s GPS technology utilized by many carriers, the accuracy is better than that.”

Regardless of the method of contacting a 911 Communications Center, staff are trained to verify the callers’ location if possible.

“Some callers are unfamiliar with their location, through appropriate training of the dispatcher and the questions they ask this will aid in the effort,” Smith said.

Journal staff writer Amanda Purcell contributed to this report.

Tips for making wireless 911 calls

•Tell the emergency operator the location of the emergency right away and provide them with your wireless phone number so if the call gets disconnected, the emergency operator can call you back.

•Learn and use the designated number in your state for highway accidents or other non-life-threatening incidents to help public safety personnel allocate emergency resources.

•Refrain from programming your phone to automatically dial 911 with one button, and if your wireless phone came pre-programmed with the auto-dial 911 feature already turned on, turn this feature off. Unintentional wireless 911 calls, which often occur when auto-dial keys are inadvertently pressed, cause problems for emergency call centers.

•If you replace your handset, you should always ask about the new handset’s E911 capabilities. Some providers may offer incentives to encourage customers without location-capable phones to obtain new location-capable phones.

•Consider creating a contact in your wireless phone’s memory with the name “ICE” (in Case of Emergency), which lists the phone numbers of people you want to have notified in an emergency.

Source: Federal Communications Commission

300 feet

The distance at which Emergency responders have difficulty locating a 911 cellphone caller,, which can be a serious problem in a city or building.

Out of date: Federal regulations relating to 911 calls have not kept up with the shift from landlines to cellphones.

What’s next: A plan by the wireless industry to improve 911 cell calls may be weaker than proposed FCC regulations.

Where are you? 911 operators say many callers can’t identify streets by name even when they live in the neighborhood.