911 emergency system broken

Call dispatch system needs a change

911 dispatch centers outdated technology has led to slow responses for urgent care.

FAIRFAXCOUNTY.GOV

911 dispatch centers’ outdated technology has led to slow responses for urgent care.

 

Shanel Anderson was delivering newspapers in the dark in Atlanta when her vehicle fell into a pond. Although she knew exactly where she was and repeatedly told 911 the streets she was located on, the 911 dispatchers could not find her on their map.

It took emergency services nearly 20 minutes to get to her. Anderson ended up dying because the system had failed her.

911 is an important number we have memorized since childhood and parents still make sure to teach their kids in case of emergency situations so they know how to react and who to call for aid. However many times it is unsuccessful in doing what we were taught it could do for us, which is to save our lives.

We all have great confidence in the 911 system, and trust the system to save us when we are in need of help, but the system can break down more than you think.

A situation like Anderson’s is not uncommon. The emergency dispatch system often loses valuable time that they could use helping others because they have trouble locating their callers.

According to the Federal Communications Center (FCC), improving location accuracy could save approximately 10,000 lives a year.

According to USA Today, your chance of 911 getting a quick fix on location ranges from as low as 10 percent to as high as 95 percent.”

When one reporter from NBC news tested a dispatch center right here in Fairfax County, he called 911 asking them to give him his location and they gave him one that was about a quarter mile away from him.

The reporter was actually standing right in their 911 center.

Why is it that our cell phones and Domino’s app for ordering pizza can tell us exactly where we are, yet 911 cannot provide that accurate information? Nowadays, even Ubers can find you with more precision than 911 can!

There is a location problem with 911 because they are in serious need of funding and new technology and because of the fact that 70 to 80 percent of all 911 calls come from cell phones.

Although The FCC mandated that they improve accuracy, fixing the location problem will not solve everything as the present 911 system faces many obstacles.

When we used to use landlines, 911 could easily match the call to your billing address and know exactly where you were. On the other hand, when using a cellphone, you could be anywhere.

Using cellphones to make 911 calls also means a greater amount of accidental 911 calls are being made.

According to the FCC, around 84 million 911 calls made a year are butt dials which leads to even more straining on the 911 emergency system.

Dispatchers often find themselves in conflicting situations in which they do not know how to handle 911 situations.

This leads to the dispatchers stressing over the idea of whether they could have done something more to save a life. This causes further strain on the workers at the centers. That stress along with funding shortages has led centers to be understaffed.

This is dangerous because if a 911 center is understaffed, the first thing one might hear when calling 911 could all be operators are busy so please remain on the line.

For the past decade, the federal government has been talking about Next Generation 911 which upgrades dispatch center to an IP based network so they could do things like accept videos and text messages.

This can be lifesaving in situations where you cannot make a phone call such as in an event of domestic violence or a home invasion.

So far, no state has enforced Next Generation 911 which makes no sense because it would make everything so much better and easier for dispatchers whose jobs are clearly already hard enough.

What makes this whole issue even worse is that almost every one phone bill has a 911 service fee that you would think goes directly to fund 911 centers, but the FCC’s fee report shows that since 2008 at least 20 states, including Virginia, have used the money elsewhere.

Diverting money from 911 into other general funds is not right. This is an unacceptable act that is putting so many people in grave danger.

911 is currently a disjointed system that needs serious upgrading. For a place that deals with life and death situations, it is scary for the 911 system to be underfunded, understaffed, and filled with outdated technology.