How To Fix 911

The emergency network was designed for landlines. Land-what? Why our safety depends on modernizing 911 for the mobile age

By Christine Kenneally Sunday, Apr. 17, 2011
    • Floto+Warner for TIME

    The multimillion-dollar 911 call center a the Hamilton County, Indiana, sheriff's office has 24 state-of-the-art, computer-aided dispatch systems. Each operator sits in a plumped-up chair at an ergonomically designed desk on which five large screens simultaneously show call status, caller information, police radio activity and other date — all of which can be shared instantly over radio, phone, Internet, dispatch and cellular systems.

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    Gajownik's maps in Hamilton County will eventually become part of the system itself, locating a caller even before the phone is answered. It will send the floor plans of a burning building to firefighters at the same time dispatchers notify them of the fire. Even callers will be able to use this kind of technology: if a caller has special needs, she may program her phone to send medical records to 911 automatically.

    Next-generation systems receive texts, e-mail and instant messages, a feature that promises to help hearing- and speech-impaired individuals, among other victims. The new 911 also handles video and images; Europe's emergency 112 system does this already in the Murcia region of Spain. If you're calling from your 3G phone, the dispatcher can remotely switch on your smart phone's video camera and give you a simple directive: point your camera at the emergency. First responders watching the feed can then count the number of cars in a pileup, evaluate the intensity of a house fire or assess injuries to victims. In 2009 a similar system was tested in Washington, D.C., over the AT&T; network and succeeded.

    New Solutions, New Problems

    "What a leap in progress it will be when a witness can take a photo of a car crash and send it to 911," FCC chairman Julius Genachowski said last June at an NENA conference. No doubt it will save lives. But what happens when 100 people do it?

    Years ago, the average highway crash may have netted one 911 call from a driver who stopped to use a public phone. Today every driver on the road has a cell phone. When a bridge in Minnesota collapsed in 2007, more than 100 calls poured into 911 in the first two minutes. The state's 911 center was equipped to handle the spike, but if each of those calls had carried video, it's unclear if dispatchers could have identified the images that actually mattered. There will be other rough patches all over the country, as call centers learn to block Internet-based pranks and decode panicked texts. Network security against viruses and sabotage will be an issue too, especially if callers are uploading data like photos.

    These next-generation challenges will be layered over a system that has some straightforwardly human problems. Everyone's heard the horror stories — dispatchers hanging up on callers or falling asleep and snoring during calls. In one case in Chattanooga, Tenn., more than 20 calls were missed because three of four dispatchers were taking a coffee break together.

    But it's also worth remembering that no matter how advanced the technology, emergencies are best served by smart people — like Michaels in Belleville, Ill. — on the other end of the line. When Michaels tried to confirm her caller's South Korean location, the woman could tell her only an apartment number, the name of her building and that she was somewhere near the Yongsan Army garrison. So Michaels turned to an old technique. "Look out the window," she said. "Tell me what you see." She kept the woman on the line while opening a conference call with Scott Air Force Base, near Belleville. A sergeant there contacted the Yongsan base in Seoul, where personnel pinpointed their rogue soldier and called in the Korean national police. Eventually, Michaels heard her caller's intercom ring 10,000 miles away. "Are you the police?" the woman asked. They were. Forty-eight minutes after Michaels' phone rang, her caller — now safe — hung up.

    This article originally appeared in the April 11, 2011 issue of TIME.

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