All the dispatcher could do was listen to the sound of the woman gasping for air.
The woman had a reaction to her medication that had caused her throat to swell. She dialed 911 on her cellular phone. But the State Patrol dispatcher couldn’t send help to her as she waited along I-5 near 128th Street.
That’s because when you call 911 from a cell phone in Snohomish County, your location is not automatically displayed — unlike your home phone.
"Fortunately somebody stopped and called us," said Larry Borrell, communications manager for the State Patrol. "If she had been out on a rural road, we would have had a lot of trouble finding her."
Cellular phones can help during an emergency, allowing callers to immediately summon aid from many places. But the state Emergency Management Division and State Patrol are warning that trading in your home phone for a cell phone could risk your safety.
New Federal Communications Commission rules allow customers to transfer their home numbers to their cell phones, and authorities expect that an increasing number of people will rely solely on wireless phones.
"Cellular phones are a nice backup, but I would give using your cellular phone as your home phone a second thought, especially if you have medical problems or are elderly and need direct access to 911," Borrell said. "I have an 85-year-old mother, and I wouldn’t recommend that for her."
When you’re calling from a landline at your home "if you’re not able to speak, you can just pull the phone down and call 911," Borrell said. "With a cellular phone, it would be very difficult" to find you.
The State Patrol, which receives about 75 percent of all wireless 911 calls in Snohomish County, says it needs to ask callers their location in order to send help. State Patrol dispatchers at the communications center in Marysville answered 206,870 wireless calls through November this year, the majority from Snohomish County.
When you dial 911 on your cell phone, dispatchers can see the location of the cell tower that picked up the call. Usually, that’s within five or six miles of where you’re calling from, but sometimes cellular 911 calls are picked up from towers farther away. The center in Marysville occasionally gets 911 calls from Canada, Borrell said.
For about half of all calls, dispatchers also receive callers’ cell phone numbers and the name of their cellular service provider.
The lack of an exact location, though, means State Patrol dispatchers in Marysville need an encyclopedic knowledge of local roads and landmarks to aid callers who don’t know where they are.
That’s not rare, Borrell said. Drivers unfamiliar with the area sometimes can’t say what road they’re on, let alone the closest cross street or exit, he said. Figuring that out can cost critical time during an emergency.
In King County, newer cellular phones equipped with a Global Positioning System show 911 dispatchers the caller’s longitude and latitude. Using mapping technology, dispatchers can know the approximate location of the caller, said Marj Williams, Snohomish County’s enhanced-911 manager.
In a demonstration of King County’s technology, a dispatcher was able to determine that a 911 caller was on I-90 headed east, Borrell said.
That technology is coming to Snohomish County next year, and could be in place as soon as September or October, Williams said. The FCC is requiring that it be available everywhere by the end of 2005.
The State Patrol’s dispatch center in Marysville already has the mapping technology. The 70-cent fee paid by wireless customers every month for 911 service will pay to install the technology at the three other emergency dispatch centers in Snohomish County — Everett-based SNOPAC, Mountlake Terrace-based SNOCOM and at the Marysville Police Department.
Snohomish County expects to receive $1.5 million from cellular 911 fees this year, Williams said. Fifty cents of the fee stays in Snohomish County. The remaining 20 cents goes into a state pool that provides money to counties that don’t have enough wireless customers to fund enhanced 911, Williams said.
If you purchased your cellular phone in the past year, it may be GPS equipped. If you aren’t sure if your phone has that capability, check with your provider.
Even when Snohomish County gets the technology to receive location information for GPS-equipped phones, a landline is still the best choice when making an emergency call, Borrell said.
Cellular reception varies and dispatchers can have difficulty hearing a cellular call. In a major emergency, such as an earthquake, cellular service could be disrupted or quickly become busy, he said.
That warning also applies to technology that allows users to make calls using the Internet, known as Voice over Internet Protocol.
"If that’s your phone, what happens when the power goes out?" Borrell said. "Technology is nice, but people need to understand what all the ramifications are."
Reporter Katherine Schiffner: 425-339-3436 or schiffner@heraldnet.com.
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
