Emergency call centers nationwide are likely to encounter new challenges when cell phone service providers cut off service today, including the ability to dial 911 to more than 1 million people.
AT&T Mobility, Alltel, Cellular One, Verizon Wireless and other cellular providers are turning off their analog networks and switching entirely to digital service.
The change signals the end of an era in cellular technology. The era gave way to a massive increase in cell phone usage by an entire generation. In the last five years, the age of the cell phone has presented positives and negatives for the emergency communications industry.
Uninitialized handsets are cellular phones that have no telephone number assigned to them for a variety of reasons. If a person buys a phone but loses or switches service, the phone is still capable of dialing 911. Some phones are sold specifically as “911 only.”
The problem uninitialized handsets create for emergency call centers is that operators are unable to determine the caller’s location and there is no callback number available if the call gets disconnected.
In addition, fielding cellular calls slows response times for operators who have to ask a number of questions to determine a dispatch location.
“The most time-consuming thing for us is determining where a person is located,” Furey said.
Old cell phones are sometimes donated to charities that then give the emergency-only handsets to at-risk people such as domestic violence victims or senior citizens, said Raleigh 911 director Barry Furey. Although this practice is theoretically beneficial to potential victims, it does present problems for emergency communications systems, he said.
If the call gets disconnected before the 911 dispatcher has determined the person’s location, the only thing the call center can do is hope the person calls back, Durham 911 director James Soukup explained. Although this situation doesn’t happen often, he said, “one time is too many.”
Cell phone usage has significantly affected 911 call volume, and in Raleigh in particular, rapid population growth has the increased the need for more resources and more staff. Last year, Furey said, there were 20,000 more calls made to Raleigh 911 than in 2006. 800 new streets were also added to the city’s 911 database.
City Council approved a $450,000 budget increase for Raleigh 911 to hire 10 additional telephone operators in July, Furey said. The center now has about 70 operators.
Durham experienced a drop in call volume last year, but Soukup said he doesn’t expect that trend to continue in 2008.
Soukup acknowledged that call volume does sometimes have an impact on the call center’s ability to answer and respond to calls in a timely manner. Durham 911 tries to dispatch 40 seconds from receiving a call, but this doesn’t always happen, he said. Raleigh’s 911 center strives to answer 90 percent of calls in 10 seconds or less.
Major highway accidents are a good illustration of 911 centers being overwhelmed with cellular calls. A traffic accident can flood the 911 center with more calls than they are able to answer.
It may also cause a back up in responding to other emergencies being called in at the same time. In 2006, more than 50 percent of calls coming into Raleigh 911 were placed from cell phones.
Although the federal government established 911 as the “universal emergency number” in 1968, they didn’t regulate it on the local level. This has caused a great deal of variation in how the system is run in different communities. In Raleigh, for example, the emergency communications system is part of the city government. In Durham, it is a city-county cooperative system.
Despite reports about high-tech hacking into 911 databases and frequent pranking, both Furey and Soukup said this is rarely a problem for their call centers. Last week, the FBI released a press advisory about “swatting,” which is a crime that involves calling 911 and faking an emergency.
Both Furey and Soukup said they had never experienced this problem.
Prank calling to 911, in general, “is not a widespread problem,” said Furey.
But even calls that come into the 911 center that seem fake have to be followed up on, said Soukup, because an emergency operator can never really know what is happening on the other end of the line.
“There are no false alarms in our industry,” Soukup said. “We make no judgments.”
