Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Scattershot 911 system leaves state vulnerable

From: Marcel <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 26 Mar 2003 09:41:07 -0500

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."

http://www.jsonline.com/news/State/mar03/125926.asp

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