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Last Words
911 Calls by Cellphone Swamp California Patrol
By JONATHAN D. GLATER, The New York Times
27/03/2003
LOS ANGELES, -- It happens when there is an accident on the freeway, when a home is burglarized or a child is missing, Deanna M. Mora says: Hundreds of people dial 911 on cellphones. The result is a tidal wave of calls to operators at the California Highway Patrol.
"We just answer until they stop," said Ms. Mora, a supervisor at the agency's Los Angeles County dispatch center.
Nearly all cellular 911 calls are answered by the highway patrol as a result of a law passed almost two decades ago, when cellphones were primarily in cars. Now the calls are overwhelming the agency's call centers, resulting at times in long waits for callers and delays in getting calls to the appropriate agency, like local police or fire departments.
"Everyone's dispatch centers are being overloaded," said D. O. Helmick, commissioner of the California Highway Patrol. The problem of the number of calls is complicated by the difficulty of determining where each caller is, to determine how to forward the call — to the police department in Los Angeles or to the fire department in Orange County, for example.
"Clearly we are trying to get the technology there to better identify where the call is being made from," Mr. Helmick said. "Hopefully in time that will be solved."
The explosion of cellphone use in recent years has resulted in a corresponding boom in the number of emergency calls fielded by the patrol. The agency's dispatch centers received more than 7 million 911 calls last year, half of them to its Los Angeles County center. Under a pilot program in San Francisco, computers sort cellular calls and if the caller is not near a highway, the call is transferred automatically, Mr. Helmick said. But not all municipalities want such technology adopted because they do not have the resources to handle additional calls. So for most 911 cellular calls, highway patrol operators must ask callers where they are and what their cellphone numbers are.
"The most important thing is locating where they're at," said Kim O'Donnell, a trainee operator at the Los Angeles County dispatch center for the highway patrol. She received a call recently from a child who said his mother had been stabbed, and then the line went dead, she said. She forwarded the telephone number of the cellphone that the child used to her supervisor, who could use it to get a home address from a cellphone service provider. That time the procedure was straightforward because the cellphone number appeared on Ms. O'Donnell's caller identification screen; often, cell numbers do not appear.
California's situation is not unique, though it is extreme. Other states have different call centers set up and do not have as many cellphone users. As of June 2002, according to the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association in Washington, California had 15.8 million cellphone subscribers — nearly half of the state's 34.5 million people. At that time the United States had about 128 million cellphone users nationwide.
In New York City, police operators forward 911 calls to the fire department, hospitals or whatever agency might be relevant.
In most states, a routing system determines the rough location of a caller and directs the call accordingly, said Kathryn Condello, vice president for industry operations at the Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association in Washington. In some counties, she said, cellular 911 operators can tell what cellular tower is closest to a caller and see that caller's cellphone number; that is known as Phase One capability.
With Phase Two technology, the location of a caller can be determined more precisely, but few parts of the country have such a system, Ms. Condello said. Rhode Island has Phase Two in effect, as do districts around Chicago and Houston.
Upgrading costs money, though, and often the money collected from cellular users by service providers to maintain and upgrade 911 service is used for other purposes, Ms. Condello said. In 2002 California's 911 surcharge fund accrued $131 million, according to the state's General Services Department. In his current budget Gov. Gray Davis of California has proposed allocating $41 million from that fund to the highway patrol, $3.5 million to the Department of Forestry and $3.6 million to the Department of Health Services.
Money alone is not the problem, though, operators said; many people are simply too quick to dial 911. People make calls by accident, some people call seeking directions or simply to complain about heavy traffic, they said. When it rained in Los Angeles this month the dispatch center received about 27,000 calls, Ms. Mora said.
"I've heard people on roller coasters" through cellphones, Ms. Mora said. Nearly a third of calls received are "dead air," the result of someone dialing 911 by accident without realizing, she added. "It's in the purse, it's in their back pocket," she said.
There are of course also real emergency calls, like one from the pilot of a private plane that crashed in California. The pilot in that case did not know where she was, recalled Thomas A. Prigatano, another supervisor at the Los Angeles County dispatch center. The pilot gave her cellphone number to operators, who used the number to find her cellular service provider, which in turn could identify the cellular tower in Simi Valley that relayed the call.
All the passengers were found with only relatively minor injuries, Mr. Prigatano said. In that instance he said, "We were able to get enough information."
Read the full article at The New York Times
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