The majority of emergency calls now come from wireless phones, but the people calling for help are difficult to find based on carrier-provided location information, according to a recent survey of managers and dispatchers at Public Safety Answering Points that handle calls to 911.
The survey of more than 1,000 PSAP personnel in all 50 states found that in particular, locating callers is difficult when they are calling from indoors. The survey by advocacy group Find Me 911 Coalition reported that 76% of 911 calls now come from mobile phones rather than land lines, and 64% of the wireless calls are made from inside buildings.
The survey is being submitted to the Federal Communications Commission by Find Me 911 in support of proposed rules to require wireless carriers to provide more accurate indoor location data for wireless users within two years.
Support for the new location information rules was nearly universal among the survey participants, with 99% supporting the proposed rules and calling them “critically” or “very” important for public safety and 94% opposing the idea of giving carriers an additional three years for implementation.
Nearly all 911 call centers – 97% – reported that they had received a wireless emergency call within the past year from a caller who could not tell the dispatcher their location, and 40% said they receive such calls regularly, in which the caller cannot provide his or her own location due to being lost, giving an inaccurate address, speaking a different language, being in the midst of a medical emergency, having age-related confusion or being too young to give an address.
Survey respondents said that the location data they currently receive from carriers is rife with errors. Fifty-four percent said that the latitude and longitude data that they receive from carriers on a caller’s position, which is known as “Phase 2” data, is “regularly” inaccurate. This leads 82% of 911 personnel to report that they “do not have much confidence in the location data.”
Slightly less than half of the survey respondents also said that 911 calls were regularly routed to the wrong PSAP in their area.
In addition to getting more accurate information about a caller’s location, the information also needs to be quickly available, the survey noted – nearly 80% of respondents said they need accurate location information within 15 seconds of a call’s arrival.
“The men and women on the front lines of our 911 system overwhelmingly say that they need accurate indoor location information to do their jobs and save lives, yet they are not getting it today,” said Jamie Barnett, director of the Find Me 911 Coalition and former chief of the FCC’s public safety and Homeland Security bureau. “This survey, and the powerful personal stories of 911 employees from around the country, removes any doubt about the life-and-death urgency of the FCC’s rule-making on this issue.”
Many of the participants anonymously shared anecdotes about serious, often life-or-death calls where the wireless user couldn’t be located, including the following stories:
- “We had an overdose subject call us and every time we rebid the call it was at a different location around our city. Had the father not called with the name of the apartment building he lived in and had we not had the phone number for an official at the apartment building, the person would have died. ”  – Idaho 911 employee
- “Our PSAP recently received what sounded like a very serious domestic assault call from a wireless phone, and we never could get an accurate location of the call. We attempted rebid several times, and no accurate location was found. We could not provide service to this desperate caller.” – Minnesota 911 employee
- “A call was received from a young child indicating that her mother was unresponsive. It took nearly 45 minutes to ascertain the correct address and even then the location provided by Phase 2 rebidding put the location of the caller to only within a 1000-yard radius.” –  New Hampshire 911 employee
- “[Our] county had a person pass away while on the phone with our communicator within the past 24 months because we could not locate her in an apartment building. It took us over 30 minutes to locate her because we could not get Phase II data. She took her last breath while on the phone with the communicator. One life is too many when the technology is available to solve the problem.” –  South Carolina 911 employee
More than 200 such responses were included in the final report, which can be downloaded here.
