If you want to track your teenager or summon a pizza to your doorstep, a mere cell phone app can handle it. Yet, if you suffer a car wreck and want emergency responders to come to the rescue, dialing 911 may not signal your precise location. That problem could soon disappear in St. Louis County. While much attention has been paid to the city’s updates to police, fire, and EMS call centers, 911 has been undergoing a quiet revolution on the local, state, and national levels. And in St. Louis County, Next Generation 911 updates are on the horizon.
Consider this: Although most of us have ditched our house phones for iPhones, the basic infrastructure of 911, like copper landlines and circuit switch technology, hasn’t changed much since it launched—in 1968. Next Generation 911 is a movement to upgrade public safety answering points, or emergency call centers, to a digital or Internet Protocol–based 911 system. Doing so unlocks the ability to connect PSAPs, which doesn’t sound that impressive, but think about the case of a natural disaster. If a tornado were to take out your local call center and you needed help, your call would be automatically forwarded to a different location. It also allows PSAPs to share information more easily and to cost-share.
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In 2009, county voters passed a sales tax that provided funding to the Emergency Communications Commission. One of the things the ECC promised in return was to look into implementing Next Gen 911. Mike Clouse, director of St. Louis County’s ECC, says it’s scheduled to roll out new features that will improve emergency services by the end of 2022. Text to 911 and more accurate location services are part of the project. (The county’s 15 PSAPs have also been linked up and are undergoing testing.) What will the updates be like? We can look to St. Charles, which has used text to 911 since 2017, as well as a service called RapidSOS to pull location information.
RapidSOS allows St. Charles emergency services to receive location data much faster. Jeff Smith, St. Charles County’s director of emergency communications, says it has improved accuracy tremendously. In St. Louis County, that’s the update that Clouse is eager to implement. “When you make a call today, the cell site tells us, ‘Hey, this call is coming from T-Mobile site number blah blah on side C,’ so we get a general idea via our CAD maps of where you are, but it doesn’t give us specific information,” he says. Dispatchers will still ask callers to verify their location, so they might not notice much of a difference. But, Clouse says, “It’s what they don’t see—it’s the data we’re already collecting with the call that helps get the fire engine, the ambulance, and the police car moving faster.”
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Text to 911 is particularly helpful when callers are unable to speak safely, like in domestic violence situations. Smith’s team has received at least one such text since its implementation. It can also come in handy for callers with hearing or speech disabilities. What might be more interesting in the future, Smith says, is when callers can send photos and stream video to 911 dispatchers, which are next-gen features. These could give first responders more situational awareness. But photos and video come with their own set of challenges.
Imagine a caller who is threatening suicide. The majority of the time, Smith says, a dispatcher can calm them until help arrives. “I’m aware of at least one case where we were not,” he says. “Imagine now a scenario where that dispatcher watches them [die]. That’s going to be very difficult.”
MORE TO KNOW
A Brief History of 911
1957: The National Association of Fire Chiefs floats the idea of using one telephone number to report fires—the beginning of 911.
November 1967: The FCC and AT&T meet to make plans for a universal emergency number. In 1968, AT&T announces it will be 911. It’s short, memorable, easily dialed, and was never established as an area code. Congress passes legislation allowing the use of the number to create an emergency calling service.
February 16, 1968: Alabama State Representative Rankin Fite makes the first 911 call, in Haleyville, Alabama.
February 22, 1968: Nome, Alaska, is next to launch 911 service.
1976: By the end of the year, 911 serves about 17 percent of the U.S. population.
2000: By the end of the 20th century, that number increases to 93 percent of the U.S. population.
Source: nema.org
