February 9, 2010

Grants will fund 911 upgrades

       A man is hunting in a wooded part of Johnson County, watching for deer from a tree stand.  He loses his footing and falls. He is injured and unable to move.  Pulling out a cell phone, he calls 911 but can't tell dispatchers his exact location.  Help arrives, but it's delayed as firefighters and paramedics scour the woods trying to find him.  That scenario is played out in Johnson County nearly every year, but new equipment paid for by a state grant will prevent it from happening again, public safety officials said.  The county is getting money to pay for equipment and software that will allow emergency dispatchers to pinpoint the location of a person calling for help from a cell phone, emergency management director Forrest "Tug" Sutton said.  And with more people ditching their landlines and relying on only cell phones to communicate, the ability to find people using cell phone signals is increasingly important, 911 board chairman and White River Township Fire Chief Jeremy Pell said.  He also expects that having a specific location to send police and firefighters to will cut down on response times since emergency workers won't have to search for a person who's called 911 but isn't sure where they are.

         When a person calls 911 in Johnson County using a landline, the address attached to the number pops up on the dispatcher's screen. Even if the person is unable to speak or does not know where they are, dispatchers can send police officers or firefighters to the exact address.  But none of the county's four 911 dispatch centers has software that can pinpoint where people are if they dial 911 on a cell phone, Greenwood Fire Department Lt. Tom Kite said.  "If a caller can't tell you where they're at, we have no way of locating them," he said.

         Two state grants totaling about $106,000 will pay for the necessary software, screens, installation and training for dispatchers to make locating cell phone users possible, Pell said. He expects the new equipment will be installed and running within about six months.  Other nearby counties also are getting the same homeland security grant as Johnson County, including Shelby and Morgan, Sutton said.  The grant money will be enough to equip each of the county's four dispatch centers, which are in New Whiteland, Greenwood, Edinburgh and the sheriff's office.  Johnson County used to have five centers until Franklin dispatchers moved in with the sheriff's office following the June 2008 flood that heavily damaged the Franklin police station.  The technology works with the county's existing geographic information system, which includes detailed maps of the county, Pell said. The software will plot an incoming cell phone call on a map, he said.  Currently, cell phone companies can use their tracking systems to narrow down a phone's location to between two or three cell phone towers, which can equal a span of miles, Pell said.  The new software will display the phone's location, within 50 to 300 yards of the phone's spot.

         Emergency workers often have to search for people who give them the wrong address or who don't know where they are, which can delay lifesaving care, Pell said.  Sometimes, a person who isn't from the county gets into a car crash but can't tell a dispatcher anything about the location except that they're on the highway or interstate.  Or people tell dispatchers they are stranded on one road when they're actually on another with a similar name, Pell said.  "People say, 'I'm on 37 just north of Olive Branch Road,' but it turns out they're just north of Stones Crossing Road," he said. "It can tack a few minutes onto response time; and as dramatic as it sounds, that can be the difference between life and death."  Being able to pinpoint cell phone callers will be especially helpful when a person is near the county line, Pell said. When a person on the west edge of White River Township calls 911, sometimes they are routed to a Morgan County dispatch center.  The call is bounced back to Johnson County after the dispatcher asks the caller questions and finds out that he or she is in another county, wasting precious time, Pell said.  Reprinted with permission from the Daily Journal

    

---