Category Archives: communications in emergencies

Deficiencies in 911 systems – “an SOS for 911”

Shaila Dewan has a good piece in this morning’s Times, describing difficulties less-affluent communities are having upgrading the 911 systems – and the attendant consequences.

The piece includes an excellent description of the various flavors and vintages of 911 systems. One particularly useful feature in the newer systems

At the next level is Enhanced 911 Phase I, as it is called, which provides the call-back number of wireless callers and the location of the cellular tower their signal has reached. Phase II provides a more precise location, accurate within 50 to 300 meters depending on the technology the carrier has chosen.

[Kevin J. Martin, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said in Washington this week that he would propose new rules to improve accuracy.] [in orig.]

Experts are laying the groundwork for what they call Next Generation 911, which will better handle Internet-based calls, text messages, cellphone photos and other forms of communication already in common use.

“Deaf people are using text messaging,†Rick Jones, the operations director for the national association, said by way of example. “They can’t talk to 911.â€

For now, though, many counties are focused on Phase II, which shows a caller’s location on a computer map, allowing emergency responders to find people who either do not know where they are or cannot say. Beyond saving lives, it promises to put a stop to chronic prank callers or tell dispatchers when many calls are coming from the same area, which happens when multiple cellphone users try to report the same car accident or heart attack, threatening to overload the system.

Link to the Times article.

Must-read: Gary Wolf’s interview with Art Botterell

is short, incisive, and, alas, some of the most accurate explantions of dysfunctional government bureaucracis. Here are some excerpts:

Botterell suggested that we begin, rather than end, with the notion that the federal government can’t protect us.The federal failure should be the starting point, and, he suggested, it could be a liberating starting point. Once free of the illusion that Mommy and Daddy are going to make it all better, we can ask smarter questions about what it will take to protect ourselves. Botterell is not a naive libertarian, and he was not talking about buying assault weapons and hunkering down in the basement. Instead, he was talking about identifying the native strengths of our communities, and reinforcing these strengths with technology.

….

Botterell has made or helped to make [important inventions] including California’s Emergency Digital Information Service (EDIS), and the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP).

….

No matter how much research is done disproving their assumptions, people insist on believing in panic. Panic actually occurs only in specific circumstances – this is all pretty well understood. Some of the research goes back to the Second World War, when there was attention paid to the behavior of sailors trapped in submarines. The research shows that where there is a dreaded hazard shared equally, panic almost never occurs. Reasoned flight is not panic. When people were running away from the collapse of the World Trade Towers, they stopped to pick up other people who had fallen. That was not panic. Only perceived competition for the means to escape creates panic. If panic is a myth, why is it mentioned so often in discussions of warning?There’s a tendency to believe in the myth of panic because it reinforces a sense of bureaucratic elitism: we can’t trust the citizens with warning information, because they might panic.

Read the whole interview here. Botterell’s blog is here.

 You can read another Gary Wolf’ piece – Reinventing 911 – How a Swarm of Networked Citizens is builing a better emergency system, from the December 2005 issue of Wired, which discusses Botterell and others.