One of the most heart-wrenching things a 911 emergency operator can hear is silence.
Especially when it is coming from a cellular phone, where up until now, it was almost impossible to trace the location of a caller.
”It tears your heart out when you realize there is a caller on the other end in need of medical attention and they can’t communicate with you,” said Raymond LaBelle, executive director of the Rhode Island E9-1-1 Telephone System. “All you can hear is the pain and frustration because they can’t tell you where they are, and you have no idea where they are calling from.”
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Last week, Rhode Island became the first state in the nation to use advanced Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to help locate people who call 911 from a wireless phone.
”The state of Rhode Island was selected by wireless carriers to test this because we are flexible and we have the equipment to implement the program,” LaBelle said.
The new program is called E911. And while it’s currently being offered by only one of the state’s six cellular phone carriers, LaBelle said, regulations from the Federal Communications Commission mandate the program’s future expansion.
According to LaBelle, in 1996 the FCC mandated that all wireless carriers provide Phase I service, meaning that they needed to provide the 911 communication center with the location of the cell tower being used to place the call.
“The cell tower picks up the call and tells us where it was coming from geographically,” LaBelle aid. “The problem is that within that sector there can be five, six or seven hundred streets, so we still weren’t exactly sure where the call was coming from.”
That was only the beginning. By 2005, the FCC has mandated that 95 percent of wireless phones be location capable. LaBelle said in order to comply most carriers are implanting a GPS chip right into the phone.
To make the system successful the state has invested more than $1.4 million to upgrade its software and equipment so that they can successfully read and handle the coordinates sent to them by the mobile phones.
What still needs to be done is a GPS map of each of the state’s 39 cities and towns.
“Right now we are working off photos and street maps,” LaBelle said. “But we are working on the program so that when we type in x and y coordinates it will come up on the screen of our computer as an exact location.”
Funding to create these maps is coming from revenue from the state’s 47-cent surcharge charged to users’ monthly bills.
“At the pace that we are going, I expect us to be fully running in about three years,” LaBelle said.
