The Bucks County Courier Times reported more troubles with 911 centers failing to send timely assistance or deal properly with callers.
Is this a problem in 911 call centers? Have they become too centralized and remote from the dispatchers who actually direct personnel? Perhaps a closer look is needed at how 911 call centers work, and how [they're] different from [traditional] dispatching centers.
It seems to me that a common characteristic of 911 call centers is centralization for a large geographic area and of course consolidating police, fire, and ambulance calls to one operator, as opposed to the previous practice of separate operators for each class of service.
In this latest case (reported below), a high school wrestler was injured at a meet at the school. The dispatcher was told exactly where to send the ambulance, including which door to use [at] the sprawling school complex. The dispatcher first sent the ambulance to a YMCA, then to a different high school, and finally to where it was needed.
In RI we have a pretty good E-911 system and on every one of our phone bills we got hit for about $1.50 a month to support that system.
Recently there've been up to 90 second delays in getting to an E-911 operator. The problem isn't technical, it's political.
That $1.50 a month paid by close to a million subscribers every month is suppose to completely fund the agency that handles all the calles to E-
911. But the money collected by the telecom companies is turned off to the Dept. of Revenue and then rolled into a thing called the General Fund.
Our legislators have regularly raided the money for E-911, same as they've done for other things like road and bridge repair, retirement accounts, etc.
The legislature also sets the budge so year after year they've left seats unfilled at the E-911 center.
I say separate the funds so that our E-911 system works the way it was designed to work.
***** Moderator's Note *****
I generally discourage "political" debates in the Digest, but this topic affects telecom very directly.
On one hand, city managers and emergency-service professionals are seeking to maximize the effectiveness of their budget dollars, and that means using semi-skilled or unskilled labor where possible. If a
911 operator hears someone laughing, and doesn't have the training to recognize it as a symptom of gas poisoning, then a citizen can die - but the city manager who cut the training budget never gets the blame.
On the other hand, taxpayers who have been squeezed by pork-barrel projects, government largess to campaign donors, and record fuel prices are being forced to endure higher insurance bills because of reduced reliability of emergency services. Higher insurance rates aren't shown in city budgets, since the taxpayers pay for their own insurance, but higher tax rates, especially for such intangibles as E911 operator training, draw immediate protests that no elected official wants to endure. If ratepayers don't think they're getting their money's worth, there's nothing they can do short of establishing volunteer fire departments and ambulance units, and the politician's know it.
To my mind, this comes down to a question of just how much technology can, and should, be expected to do: if E911 can locate an incoming call to a particular apartment in a 50-unit building (it does), and thus save lives by eliminating address errors, most voters would agree that the cost is worth it. But if the employees hired to man the system are unskilled political hangers-on who've been awarded a sinecure, then the questions gets more complicated: emergency service officers want trained professionals who can make decisions and utilize the field forces most effectively: in other words, they feel that E911 is a tool that only firefighters and police officers are able to utilize with maximum effectiveness. Politicians, on the other hand, want campaign workers whose only real talent is loyalty to the regime, and they feel that the E911 technology is good enough to allow anyone to do the job.
YMMV.
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)
How were call centers, both old 911 and pre-911, funded before this fee? A common task of Bell operators was to connect callers to the proper emergency service line, indeed, to assist callers if necessary in passing along information; I believe the Bell System assumed this cost.
Sadly, this is so common in politics.
It seems call centers get centralized out of local jurisdiction. Our is run by the county, and while we vote for county supervisors, it's not a big election issue. Our local town council avoids any responsibility even though it oversees the police department.
The technology is clearly imperfect. The databases are not always accurate.
But more importantly is that the operators are not as thoroughly trained and not familiar with geography. I blame centralization of call centers. In my region there are many developments with quaint names and a big blur of post offices, municipalities, and commonly used names, none of which coincide. (And neither do phone rate center exchanges). This has resulted in much confusion of dispatching of services to the wrong place and disasters as a result.
Years ago in Philadelphia the police dept dispatchers are sectionalized, so that dispatchers got more familiar with particular neighborhoods of the city. IMHO this was a critically useful skill. Later they centralized all dispatchers and that caused more confusion. For one thing, despite computers, having a human have an idea of the overall picture is critical. A boy was killed by muggers despite repeated calls to E911 because the numerous calls were answered by a variety of operators, none of whom realized something serious was going on and failed to issue the emergency priority dispatch.
I have been frustrated calling 911 in the suburbs since there aren't hard street addresses as in the city. I reported a problem "on South Main Street in Smithtown across from the bank" and the operator had trouble since I had no street address and obviously had no idea what I meant. A local cop certainly would've understand had they transmitted that message.
I forgot it on the original post, but added it here. Sorry about that.
***** Moderator's Note *****
No need to apologize: I can't take offence, since I never saw the post ;-).
Bill Horne Temporary Moderator
(Please put [Telecom] at the end of the subject line of your post, or I may never see it. Thanks!)
Prior to the rollout of E-911 you simply dialed the Operator. The cost of those services was of course absorbed by Bell and then passed on in some small amount to every subscriber.
In the case of VoIP it is as accurate as the information the subscriber enters.
One of the issues that had to be resolved here in Rhode Island was standardizing and normalizing address data. In essence everything got a building number and street description.
I know in some parts of the country they have moved to consolidated call centers hosted either by a consortium of municipalities or the state police. I could see how a dispatcher who has never been to a community
50-100 miles away could get a detail wrong.
Around where I live the cities & counties operate their own. This can be aggravating where I live because City of Austin and Travis and Williamson Counties are all an earshot from each other and calling 9-1-1 on a cell phone almost guarantees you'll get the wrong one. On the plus side though is local knowledge. I monitor local agencies on my radio scanner and am amazed just how well dispatchers know their territory. Not much happens in Austin and I hear a lot of "cattle on highway" calls. The dispatcher will say, "Do the cattle have red tags or blue tags on them? Blue? Oh, that's ole Bill's cattle. He lost a fence post in that accident last week on highway 29 and I guess he still doesn't have it fixed."
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