Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Emergency dispatch centers bogged down by old equipment-Wisconsin Found to Have Far to Go on 911 Location Technology

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 13:33:23 -0500

Wisconsin Found to Have Far to Go on 911 Location Technology

A study of the availability of technology to receive location information on 911
calls in Wisconsin found a broad array of results. Cities such as Milwaukee,
Waukesha and Whitefish Bay, as well as Dane, Brown and Rock counties have
technology that receives location information on landline calls. However, other
counties can only receive landline callers' phone numbers, one county receives
no information at all, and one county does not have 911 service. In addition to
upgrading 911 service for landline callers in the state, there also is concern
about getting location information from cell phone calls. Wisconsin currently
has no funding mechanism for upgrading dispatch centers with wireless
location technology. Wireless carriers in the state say they are ready to supply
it when the funding is available. The state legislature is now debating
consolidating some of Wisconsin's 172 emergency dispatch centers, and
placing a surcharge on consumers' cell phone bills to raise funds for the new
technology. The Federal Communications Commission requires that 911
wireless location technology be available across the U.S. in 2005.
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Original URL: http://www.jsonline.com/news/state/mar03/125926.asp

Scattershot 911 system leaves state vulnerable

Emergency dispatch centers bogged down by old equipment-

By AMY RINARD
[email-masked]

Last Updated: March 15, 2003

Pinned facedown in the snow, an injured snowmobiler managed to reach into his jacket and
grab what he trusted was his hotline to immediate
help - a cell phone. Alone on a trail, he called 911 and was connected to the Waukesha
County Sheriff's Department, where dispatchers swung
into action.

Only one problem: They didn't know where he was. He didn't know where he was. The last
location he could
identify was a tavern near Lannon.

All rescue crews could do was fan out over every snowmobile trail in the Lannon area until
they found him -
eventually.

"Turned out he was OK, but do you know how many miles of snowmobile trails there are in
that area? A lot. That
caused real delay in getting to that guy," said Bob Jacobs, Waukesha County emergency
dispatch manager.

At a time when local 911 centers are relied on more than ever as the front line for
personal emergencies, a close
look at Wisconsin's 911 systems reveals a patchwork of jurisdictions, a mishmash of
equipment and a corps of
emergency responders forced every day to struggle - sometimes in vain - with technological
inadequacies to get
help to cell phone callers.

With federal government pressure growing on states to upgrade their 911 systems, Wisconsin
officials are taking
their first comprehensive look at the state's 911 emergency dispatching capabilities. Many
do not like what they
see.

"The state of 911 around the state is like scrambled eggs," said Sen. Bob Jauch
(D-Poplar), who has been
involved in several rounds of legislative negotiations on the issue.

Until last week, no one even knew exactly how many 911 dispatch centers there were in
Wisconsin. A survey
undertaken for the Wisconsin Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association, done by
calling every
county, found 172 "public service answering points" in the state.

A few 911 dispatch centers in Wisconsin - among them, the cities of Milwaukee, Waukesha
and Whitefish Bay,
along with Dane, Brown and Rock counties - have state-of-the-art computer-assisted
dispatching systems. But
many 911 centers around the state, particularly in rural northern counties, are decades
behind technology.

Most counties have what is known as "enhanced 911" systems that give dispatchers, as soon
as the call is
received, the phone number of the land line phone where the call originated, the address
where that phone can
be found and the name of the person or company that pays the phone bill at that address.
Emergency responders
can be dispatched to a location even if the caller is unable to speak.

Five counties - Bayfield, Monroe, Kewaunee, Florence and Forest - have "basic 911"
systems, which are
equipped to receive only the phone number of the originating call. Although dispatchers
don't have the caller's
location, they can at least call back if a connection is lost - although they're out of
luck if the caller is not able to
speak.

One county - Iron - has a 911 dispatch center that receives no information about the
originating call, not even the
callback number. "I call that pseudo-911," said David Sleeter, Rock County communications
director and a former
president of the Wisconsin Chapter of the National Emergency Number Association.

And then there is Menominee County. If you wipe out on a snowmobile, hit a deer with your
car or have any
other emergency in Menominee County, don't bother calling 911. No one will answer. Thirty
years after 911 was
recognized as the national emergency number and 20 years after 911 became common across
Wisconsin,
Menominee County still does not have a dispatch center capable of receiving 911 calls.

"In Menominee County, you'd have to call the police or the hospital or whatever directly,"
said Annemarie
Neuman, a spokeswoman for the state Public Service Commission.

Cell phone chaos

"Rock County 911 . . . Rock County 911 . . . Rock County 911."

There was no response, and the dispatcher realized that there was no one on the other end
of the line. It happens
all the time. Thousands of unintended calls flood into already busy 911 dispatch centers
across Wisconsin every
week.

It happens any time a one-button 911 speed dial, a feature of many cell phones, is set off
when a phone is
bumped or jostled. The National Emergency Number Association has said these unintended
calls often amount
to half of all the wireless 911 calls received.

"Sometimes I can hear people checking out at the grocery store or singing along with the
radio in their cars when
I get these calls," the dispatcher said.

Such calls are among a whole new set of problems for 911 centers caused by the explosion
in cell phone use.

In addition to the volume of unintended calls, dispatch centers can get 15 or 20 calls
reporting a single accident,
as every other motorist passing the same accident scene reaches for a cell phone.

Then there is the quality of the call itself. Cell phone calls to 911 often are lost as
the signal fades, or sometimes
they cut in and out so much that dispatchers can't understand what callers are saying.

Currently there are about 2.5 million cell phone subscribers in Wisconsin, and that number
grows daily. In most
urban areas of the state, half of all 911 calls now received by local dispatch centers are
from callers using cell phones.

And although some other states have more advanced technology - at least in urban centers -
no 911 dispatchers in Wisconsin can
automatically identify the location of cell phone callers.

"It's a case where technology has outstripped our ability to handle it," Sleeter said. "It
happened so fast, no one thought about its effect on
public safety."

All cell phone 911 calls are supposed to be routed to the sheriff's department of the
county where the call was made. Dispatchers then
automatically see a display of the originating phone number, so they can call back if
needed.

But problems can arise:

If the caller is near a county border, the call may get sent to the wrong county. If the
caller is near a state line, the call may get sent to the
wrong state.
If the person is unable to speak, dispatchers must take down the originating number and
run it through databases to locate the name
and address of the cell phone subscriber. Then they search for a residential land line
phone listing, call that number and hope someone
answers who knows where the cell phone caller was heading.
If the person is unable to speak and happens to have blocked the cell phone's caller-ID
function, the dispatcher may have to resort to
listening for sounds and trying to guess what part of the county those sounds might come
from.

Sometimes, it's just impossible for dispatchers to locate a cell phone caller. In August
2001, Rock County dispatchers were unable to locate a
woman who had called 911 on her cell phone as she was attacked by an intruder in her
apartment. The woman was raped and beaten. She now is
suing the county, claiming that dispatchers did not try hard enough to find her and send
help. Rock County officials declined to comment on
the suit.

Losing precious minutes

Wisconsin is one of only four or five states in the nation that have not yet set up a
funding mechanism to assist local 911 emergency call
centers in paying for upgraded computer equipment and maps. The Federal Communications
Commission has set a 2005 deadline for all call
centers to be able to locate cell phone callers.

"We are further behind than most states, but this is absolutely critical," said Waukesha
County's Jacobs. "More and more people have cell
phones, and some people are even giving up their land line phones at home in favor of cell
phones."

By doing that, he said, they are running the risk of losing precious minutes in an
emergency as dispatchers try to locate them.

Victoria Liccione of Fox Point knows what it's like to have the clock ticking while a 911
dispatcher tries to determine where to send help.

She was biking with her husband, Stephen, along a trail that connects Shorewood to
downtown Milwaukee, when three youths stepped out in
front of them and blocked the path in a very wooded and secluded section.

When the couple slammed on their brakes, Stephen Liccione flipped over his bike and
crashed face first onto the pavement. The youths took
off running, and Victoria Liccione used her cell phone to call 911.

Victoria Liccione said she tried to describe the location, but the dispatcher said she
needed a street address. Another bicyclist happened by
and rode off the trail to look for the nearest street address while Victoria Liccione
stayed with her husband.

"If this had been a life-threatening injury, he would have been dead," Victoria Liccione
said. "It took about 40 minutes from when the accident
took place and I called, to when the ambulance arrived at the scene."

Stephen Liccione, a lawyer and former U.S. attorney, suffered cuts and bruises in the
crash and recovered. But his wife is still angry that the cell
phone location technology was not in place.

"People should know that there are places even in the city that are so secluded it would
be hard to find you in an emergency," she said.

Consolidation encouraged

After a few failed attempts, new legislation has been introduced to begin putting in place
the technology to let 911 dispatch centers locate cell
phone callers in Wisconsin.

Bill Esbeck, executive director of the Wisconsin State Telecommunications Association,
said cellular service providers are ready to install the
equipment needed to locate wireless callers as soon as the funding mechanism is in place.

Cellular service providers will need to equip their towers to be able to triangulate the
location of a 911 cell phone caller and to transmit the
latitude and longitude of that cell phone to the dispatch center where the call is routed.

Triangulation determines the distance between points by dividing an area into triangles,
measuring a base line between two points, then
locating a third point by computing angles and lengths.

Esbeck believes that in areas of Wisconsin where there are not enough towers to do the
triangulation, cellular service providers may rely on
global positioning signals transmitted from the cell phone handset to the nearest tower to
obtain the latitude and longitude of the caller.

A bill advanced by Republicans to help pay for all this and for upgrades to local 911
centers appears to be on the fast track in the Legislature. It
would authorize the state Public Service Commission to verify the costs of improving the
wireless 911 system, and add a surcharge to cell
phone users' monthly bills for three years to pay for it.

One provision of the bill is that funding would be provided to only one 911 dispatch
center in each county - essentially forcing the patchwork
of jurisdictions to consolidate.

That sets up a conflict between jurisdictions in many parts of the state where local
operations will not want to shut down. One example:
Milwaukee, where the city has just opened a new state-of-the-art $20 million
communications center.

"We would be able to provide the service long before Milwaukee County, because they would
need to upgrade their entire system," said
Patrick Curley, the city's director of intergovernmental relations. "We're already there."

Sleeter, who heads the legislative committee of the Wisconsin Emergency Number
Association, said the state should not force dispatch centers
to consolidate because "it's not the answer in all cases."

And it takes time. Rock County has the state's only truly consolidated dispatch center,
with every municipality and town participating. But it
took years to work out the agreement, said Sleeter.

Impact of Sept. 11 attack

But Waukesha County Executive Dan Finley said it is appropriate for the state to encourage
consolidation of 911 services. In his county, 29 of
37 municipalities and towns have agreed to consolidate their emergency dispatching
services, so Waukesha is far down the road. But it did take
years to get to that point.

"There's no question consolidation of emergency dispatch saves a substantial amount of
taxpayer money, and the state should encourage
that," he said.

Rep. Scott Jensen (R-Town of Brookfield), one of the co-sponsors of the bill, said it is
unreasonable to impose a surcharge on cell phone users
to pay for upgrading every dispatch center in the state.

Jensen and others questioned whether the state really needed 172 different 911 dispatch
centers. He noted that in some small communities, the
local dispatch centers close at 5 p.m. and switch over their calls to the county sheriff's
department anyway.

Other centers may offer 24-hour service so they can justify having staff on duty to do
clerical tasks at night, he said, and some law enforcement
departments may operate a 911 center as a rationale for keeping their doors open 24 hours
as a public service.

"If they have a compelling case for operating a dispatch center, they should have no
problem convincing local taxpayers to pay for it," said
Jensen. "But as the state moves to an enhanced system to handle cellular calls to 911, we
are willing to pay for one answering point per
county."

Sleeter argues that unless a consolidated dispatch center is "truly consolidated" - with
call takers and dispatchers for every participating
jurisdiction working together in one room - critical minutes can be lost. He fears that
what will pass for consolidation will actually be a variation
on what's done now with cell phone calls, with sheriff's departments getting the calls and
then farming them out to local responders.

"In three or four minutes you can be brain dead in a heart attack," said Sleeter. "Do you
want to be transferred between jurisdictions for even
one of those minutes?"

Another bill, sponsored by Jauch, calls for establishing a monthly surcharge of 75 cents
for every cell phone subscriber to create a fund to
partially reimburse cellular providers and local governments for costs of putting in place
the new technology. A wireless 911 board would be
created to administer the funds.

There now is a 911 charge on all phone bills, but that money goes only to telephone
companies for use in maintaining the current 911 landline
technology. Local dispatch centers get none of that money.

"The World Trade Center incident opened the eyes of people around the country to this
issue," said Jauch. "The number of cell phone users is
multiplying every couple of months and so will the number of all wireless 911 calls."

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