Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Tragedy puts focus on 911 cell calls

From: [email-masked]
Date: Fri, 16 May 2003 10:10:25 -0400

Posted on Fri, May. 16, 2003

Tragedy puts focus on 911 cell calls
By Robert Moran
Inquirer Staff Writer

If you call 911 with a cell phone in Philadelphia or Bucks County, the operator won't know
where you are unless you describe the location.

But what if you don't know where you are? Or can't speak?

Consider the case of Reinaldo Zayas, 25, of Kensington, who somehow dialed 911 after he
was kidnapped and stabbed repeatedly inside his minivan in North Philadelphia the night of
May 5. But because he was unable to tell 911 operators where he was, they listened in vain
to his screams for 18 minutes. He was found dead a day later.

Unlike 911 calls from land lines, which provide police with phone numbers and addresses
and can be traced, cellular-phone calls provide no information to police.

Technology, however, is available to find cell-phone callers, and Pennsylvania lawmakers
have introduced bills over the last two years that would have sped up the arrival of such
systems in the state. But the lawmakers failed to reach a consensus and the bills died.

Now, similar legislation is pending in the General Assembly and has a good chance of
becoming law - the culmination of lengthy negotiations among a complicated array of
parties over an even more complicated issue.

Under the legislation, the upgrade in technology would be financed by a $1-a-month
surcharge on the five million cell phones in use statewide.

"This is a cheap price to pay for safety," said Charles Brennan, deputy police
commissioner, who oversees Philadelphia's 911 system.

Some Pennsylvania counties already have moved forward to implement the technology - known
as enhanced 911, or E911 - that can pinpoint a cell-phone user's location.

Under Federal Communications Commission rules, E911 is broken into categories based on
available technology.

At what some officials call Phase Zero, the 911 center receives the wireless call, but no
information about the caller - with neither the location or the cell-phone's number. At
Phase One, 911 operators get the cell-phone number and the location of the nearest cell
tower. At Phase Two, operators get the information and are able to locate the cell phone
to within a few hundred feet.

Leading the pack is Delaware County, which began operations at Phase Two last October.

Montgomery County is not quite at Phase One yet, getting only the cell-tower information.
Chester County gets only the phone number. No New Jersey county has reached Phase Two yet.

Philadelphia and Bucks County are still in the dark.

Better wireless technology might have aided Zayas and others in similar tragedies that
have drawn national attention.

In January, four teenage boys drowned in Long Island Sound after one of them called 911
but could not describe where their small boat was that night. The 911 system was not
equipped to locate the call.

Last year, a 32-year-old woman drowned in her overturned car in a canal off the Florida
Turnpike after she called 911 but was unable to tell a dispatcher where she was.

While a third of all 911 calls nationwide are made from wireless phones, less than 2
percent of communities have the technology to locate those calls, according to the
National Emergency Number Association.

"Communities should make this a priority," said Stephen Seitz, the association's director
of government affairs. "Look no further than what happened in Philadelphia."

Houston is at the forefront of implementation, as are Rhode Island and Indiana.

But nationwide, E911 implementation has been slowed by the complexity of the task.

Six major wireless phone carriers handle the majority of U.S. calls. There are 5,300 local
911 call centers. The FCC oversees much of the process.

Because it has not passed legislation, Pennsylvania lags in collecting money to pay for
the multimillion-dollar upgrades. Forty-one other states - including New Jersey - have
funding mechanisms.

However, even though some states started collecting money in the early 1990s to pay for
the upgrades, the technology has been phased in only in the last several years. Some
states have raided their E911 funds to offset mounting budget deficits.

Some local jurisdictions, such as Delaware County, decided not to wait for state money.
The county spent nearly $8 million to make the needed improvements and began tracking
wireless calls last October.

Still, not all Delaware County wireless calls can be located. Verizon, Sprint and Nextel
customers need new phones with location technology built into the handset. AT&T, Cingular
and T-Mobile use a network-based system of locating a phone by triangulating a signal
using cell towers.

When a wireless call is placed to Delaware County's 911 center in Lima, call-takers
instantly see on one screen the phone number and the latitude and longitude of the
caller's location. That translates on a second screen as a point on a computer map of the
county. Call-takers still ask callers for their location to verify the information on the
screens.

More than half of the 500,000 911 calls that are received each year in Delaware County
come from wireless phones, said Ed Truitt, the county's director of emergency services.

In Philadelphia, about 35 percent of the 3.3 million 911 calls last year were made on cell
phones, said Brennan, the deputy commissioner.

Joseph James, who oversees city communications systems, said Philadelphia had not moved
forward on wireless 911 because of the cost and uncertainty about the technology's
effectiveness.

James said he estimated an upgrade would cost from $2 million to $5 million or
"significantly more."

If state funding becomes available, it would be at least two years before the city could
have a fully operational wireless 911 system, Brennan said.

And if that money is not available, he added, the city will not upgrade to a new system
because of the cost.

Two almost identical E911 bills are pending in Harrisburg. Both call for a $1-a-month
surcharge on cell phones. The resulting fund would pay for upgrade costs incurred by
counties and by wireless carriers. The money could not be spent for anything else.

The House passed its version last week. The Senate moved its version out of committee on
Monday.

"We'll try to bring the two bills together and get something done as soon as we can," said
Sen. Joe Conti, a Bucks County Republican and sponsor of the Senate version.

"For the public safety of Pennsylvania," he said, "we have to get this done quickly."

http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/news/local/5872106.htm
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~-->
Get A Free Psychic Reading! Your Online Answer To Life's Important Questions.
http://us.click.yahoo.com/Lj3uPC/Me7FAA/uetFAA/61FxlB/TM
---------------------------------------------------------------------~->

Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/