Tips for 911 calling People making a 911 call from a wireless phone should remember the following: —Tell the emergency operator the location of the emergency right away. —Provide the operator with your wireless phone number, so if the call gets disconnected, the emergency operator can call you back. —If your wireless phone is not “initialized” (meaning you don’t have a contract with a wireless service provider) you must call the 911 operator back if you get cut off. The operator will not have your phone number and can’t contact you. —Don’t program your phone to automatically dial 911 when one button, such as the “9” key, is pressed. —If your wireless phone came pre-programmed with the auto-dial 911 feature already turned on, turn it off. Consult your user manual for instructions. —Lock your keypad when you’re not using your phone to prevent accidental 911 calls. —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. Usually emergency responders do arrive in minutes. But the process of dispatching them is not that simple — at least not as simple as it used to be. “Prior to wireless phones, when someone called 911 they were calling from a land line,” said Plumas County Deputy Administrative Sheriff Mike Grant. “You had to have a physical address to have a phone.” That address would allow 911 dispatchers to quickly point emergency responders in the right direction, even if the caller was disoriented and couldn’t provide the address. The introduction of cellphones made the dispatchers’ job more complicated. Emergency personnel had to rely on the callers — who were often distressed — to accurately provide their location. According to recent statistics, 70 percent of calls to 911 are from wireless phones. In Plumas County, 5,500 land lines have been dropped since 2007. Most of those people now use wireless phones exclusively. Even though wireless phones produced since 2007 are equipped with global positioning systems, the GPS isn’t as accurate in rural areas as it is in a city. If someone calls 911 on a pre-2007 cellphone, it can pose a challenge for 911 dispatchers and emergency responders — especially if the call gets cut off. “In cities there are hundreds of cell towers, so it is easy to come up with a good location of a call,” Grant said. “In rural areas it doesn’t work well. There might be one tower or maybe two.” Sometimes the only information dispatchers have is the approximate distance the caller was from the nearest tower. Dispatchers can tell which side of the tower the call came from, but that might only narrow the location to a 30-square-mile area — oftentimes the area is much larger. If a 911 caller using a wireless hangs up or gets cut off before a dispatcher can confirm his or her location, finding that person can be challenging. Dispatchers at the sheriff’s office or California Highway Patrol will call the number back if they have it in an attempt to “pin” the caller’s location. But even that can leave a wide margin of err
Posted on: Tue, 11 Jun 2013 23:20:00 +0000
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