Friday, Jan. 7, 2005 | 5:02 a.m.
WEEKEND EDITION
January 8 - 9, 2005
Oliver Villanueva's family keeps a prepaid cell phone in case of emergency.
But should an emergency happen, the phone may not bring help.
"I thought if you could only dial 911, the computer can find you, even if you maybe get lost in the mountains or the desert," the 17-year-old Las Vegas resident said.
But in most parts of Nevada, including most of the Las Vegas Valley, emergency dispatchers can't tell where a cellular phone call is coming from or even what the caller's phone number is.
That may be critical information on a 911 call.
"It's literally a matter of life and death," said Richard Mirgon, director of communications and emergency management for Douglas County.
When you call 911 from a land line phone, a dispatcher sees an address and a phone number. If the phone goes dead or the caller can't speak, emergency crews can be sent to the address.
But police don't have the millions of dollars it takes to upgrade their equipment to locate cellular calls. With more and more 911 calls coming from wireless phones, that's a real problem, officials said.
One of the main purposes of 911, Mirgon said, is to aid the "silent caller" -- someone who can't speak because he or she is having a heart attack, or has been taken hostage, or is being beaten by a spouse, for example.
"People take for granted that when they call on a cell phone, they're getting the same level of service as with a land line," said Mirgon, who studies the issue of wireless 911 for the Nevada chapters of the Association of Public-Safety Communications Officials and the National Emergency Number Association.
Instead, when you call from a cell phone, "we don't know where you are, we don't see a phone number -- the only number that shows up is the 800 number of the wireless carrier," said Capt. Mark Medina, head of the Metro Police communications bureau. "That's absolutely useless to us."
Across the country, tragedies have resulted from emergency services' inability to tell where 911 cell calls are coming from.
In 1993 an operator in Rochester, N.Y., listened helplessly as 18-year-old Jennifer Koon was raped and shot to death by her captors after being abducted from a mall parking lot. The girl had called 911 from her cell phone but was unable to speak.
In 2003 four teenagers drowned after calling 911 from a sinking boat off New York City. The brief, panicked call ended before the dispatcher could ask where they were, and no emergency personnel were sent.
Nevada is certainly not alone in being unable to help callers like these. Only about 20 percent of emergency dispatch centers in the country can tell precisely where a wireless 911 call originates.
When dispatchers don't have this capability, even cell phone callers who can talk and know where they are can be victims of a low battery, spotty signal or jurisdictional mix-up.
Mirgon said his department regularly gets wireless 911 calls from the California side of Lake Tahoe. The cell towers don't recognize state lines -- they just route the signal to the nearest open phone line.
"We took a 911 call from a person trapped on a cliff in the rain," Mirgon said. "All they knew was they were at Lake Tahoe."
Douglas County authorities questioned the victim until his location could be pinpointed. When he turned out to be on the California side of the lake, they called the California Highway Patrol, Mirgon said. But if the man's phone had died, he might have been out of luck.
Lacking locator service can especially be a problem in Las Vegas, where many callers are tourists who don't know the lay of the land, Mirgon noted.
The problem is cost. It takes millions of dollars for law enforcement agencies to upgrade the technology.
Only one Nevada jurisdiction has done so: The Henderson Police Department began upgrading its computers two years ago and now is fully capable.
Washoe County is in the process of putting locator technology in place; no other jurisdiction is currently taking action, Mirgon said.
In many of Nevada's rural counties, even land line callers can't be located by dispatchers, he noted. And in some areas, such as Goldfield, callers can't even call 911 -- they must know a seven-digit emergency number.
That's no problem for residents, but it could stump a stranded motorist on one of Nevada's remote highways.
Success story
The Henderson dispatch center has been implementing wireless 911 locator service since late 2002, bringing the many cell phone carriers on line one at a time, said Sandra Waide, senior technology analyst of the Henderson Police Department.
"People are tending nowadays to replace their home phones with cell phones, but what they don't realize is that the 911 system may not have the capacity to know where you are or even your phone number. And you may not be able to tell (the dispatcher)," said Barbara Brabenec, Henderson Police communications administrator.
According to Boston research firm The Yankee Group, 10 million people rely solely on a cell phone, with no land line at home. Out of 172 million cell phone subscribers, that's a small percentage, but a growing one, industry observers say.
Henderson's upgrade has saved much time and trouble for those who answer 911 calls, Brabenec said.
Without locator service, "dispatchers are spending time trying to figure out where you are instead of spending time helping you," she said.
"We've had people out in the desert, out on an ATV, and they have no idea where they are," she added. "We have to ask, 'Do you see any buildings? Any mountains? Where's the sun? How did you get there?' "
Using money from the city's general fund, the police department spent about $7 million on new computers to accommodate wireless 911 locator information, which is sent by the individual wireless carriers, Waide said.
The location of the cell tower to which a wireless call is routed determines which 911 center it will go to. Most calls placed from within Henderson city boundaries will be routed to the Henderson dispatch center, but those placed from just inside the border could go to Metro instead, or a call slightly outside the border could go to Henderson.
Henderson's computers can locate callers within 15 meters, about the width of a four-lane road. That's fantastic for a lost ATV driver, or someone drowning in Lake Mead, but not so good for some urban situations, Mirgon noted.
"If you're standing in the middle of the MGM Grand, you could be three floors up or down and several rooms to the left or right," he said.
Moving forward
Locator technology hasn't come to most of Nevada, nor most of the country, because the wireless industry has been slow to move forward with the money for the necessary technological improvements, according to Mirgon.
"I'm convinced that if the industry wanted to fix it, it could be fixed in 18 months," he said.
Wireless carriers have successfully pushed back the federal deadline -- now December -- for having the capability to provide location information about cell calls to properly equipped dispatch centers, Mirgon said.
But the industry says it is not to blame.
"While wireless carriers continue to upgrade their systems and build up their networks, not everyone on the other side is pulling their weight," said Erin McGee, spokeswoman for the wireless industry's trade group, the Washington-based Cellular Telecommunications and Internet Association.
It is up to local areas to upgrade their equipment so they can receive the location data the wireless carriers transmit, McGee said.
"If we have that information and we can't do anything with it, it kind of defeats the purpose," she said.
She also pointed out that even today, 128 years after the invention of the telephone, 25 percent of land line 911 calls don't provide dispatchers with detailed information.
Wireless is "still a new industry, a developing industry," McGee said. "We are continuing to build out our networks. It's a large task, but we continue to work to accomplish it."
Mirgon acknowledged that, while he believes the industry should be doing more, emergency agencies must recognize the importance of the issue.
"The bottom line is, we have an obligation to protect people," he said. "It has to at least qualify as one of the top priorities in public safety."
Changing landscape
Cell phones are changing what it means to call 911. More and different emergencies -- and nonemergencies -- are getting reported, making dispatchers' jobs more complicated.
"Wireless has taken the 911 systems we've had in this country since the '60s and made them obsolete," Mirgon said.
While 911 dispatchers across the nation are getting more and more calls from cell phones -- in Henderson, cell calls to 911 make up about 30 percent of the total -- those calls tend to be different than land line calls, Henderson's Waide said.
Cell phone calls often come from people who have witnessed a vehicle crash or an alleged incident of "road rage," a crime in progress or a medical emergency, Waide said. Since there are often multiple witnesses to such an event, the cell lines may all light up at once because of a single incident.
Cell phones make it convenient to call 911, leading to more calls that aren't necessarily emergencies requiring rapid response. And many cell phones come preprogrammed to call 911 when one key is held down, usually the 1 or 9 key -- leading to false alarms when people sit on their phones or otherwise press the button accidentally.
Accidental calls are no small problem: the National Emergency Number Association estimates that 40 percent to 60 percent of all emergency calls come from mistakenly dialed cell phones.
McGee said that problem has already been dealt with. About a year ago, upon the urging of the Federal Communications Commission, the association developed a manufacturing standard that recommends that phones not be shipped with a preprogrammed 911 key.
People can still program their own phones, she noted. "For example, the wireless industry supports programs for domestic violence victims." Law enforcement might provide a battered woman with an emergency phone that had 911 programmed into it.
The boom in cell phones, more than half of all Americans have one, has been a boon to emergency personnel because more emergencies can be reported more quickly, said Greg Rohde, executive director of the E-911 Institute, a Washington nonprofit group dedicated to pushing for legislation.
While it's tragic when police can't find a caller because they lack locator equipment, that call could never have been made in the first place without a cell phone, he said.
"Because of advances in technology, we're in a rather ironic position: We have more ways to call for help, but cell phones are not as reliable for 911 service," Rohde said.
Wireless carriers fall under the sole jurisdiction of the Federal Communications Commission and are not subject to state or local regulation.
If a particular jurisdiction wants to offer wireless 911 locator service, it must upgrade its equipment, then notify all the wireless carriers. The carriers then have six months to start providing the information to the jurisdiction's computers.
The carriers must shoulder the cost to re-outfit their cell towers with locator equipment. Locating can be done either by "triangulating" a caller's location relative to multiple cell towers or by Global Positioning System, or GPS, satellite. Which method to use is up to the carrier.
The FCC is requiring the carriers to be prepared to provide location information nationwide by next year, a deadline that has been pushed back based on pleas from the industry.
Meanwhile, local governments have to pay for the upgraded computers. The federal government estimates it would cost more than $8 billion to outfit the whole country; the legislation that Rohde's group is pushing for would provide some federal funding.
Getting it done
Attempts to get statewide funding to improve 911 service have foundered in the Legislature, although last session's homeland security bill included a pledge to examine the status of the 911 capabilities and the compatibility of the state's 400 emergency agencies.
In the past three sessions, a bill failed that would have charged each cell phone user a 25-cent surcharge, Waide said.
"People view it as a tax, and they don't want to pay taxes," she said. "They don't see it as a service."
But Medina said Clark County residents are reluctant to foot the bill for something that will also benefit nonresidents. Although no cost estimate has been made, Metro -- the largest police force in the state -- is 10 times the size of the Henderson force, which spent $7 million.
"This is very expensive, and I would hope that somehow those people coming into the Las Vegas area with cell phones from other areas also pay," he said.
Medina said the department knows it's behind on an important task.
"It's like spinning plates," he said. "We're looking at it, we know we need to do it soon, but we're just barely in the planning stages."
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