What Takes So Long To Act When Lives Are At Stake?
Since 2001, the FCC has ordered cell phone carriers to deliver the location of 911 calls to PSAPs (Public Service Answering Points .. 911 Centers in English). So, why is it nearly the end of 2005 and people are still dying or suffering needlessly while otherwise dedicated police, fire and ambulance agencies blunder around the countryside looking for the victims in need?
A question each and every reader of this blog might well ask their local emergency services providers .. and their cell phone providers.
There has been one delay, extension and even in some cases flagrant disregard for the FCC orders. Most of the reluctance trumpets the old tune of “It’s too expensive”, but mainly that excuse is absolute bunk. And, in the case where cities and counties do have valid budget concerns the rebuttal to the money excuse is .. what are your priorities?
When I was a boy in a great majority of the US there wasn’t even ambulance service. Many rural areas had contracts with local funeral homes to send hearses out to highway accidents .. saved a lot of effort if the victims died, after all, they were going to wind up flat on their back in a hearse anyway, so why not save time and trouble?
Today we have made tremendous improvements in emergency service skills and equipment. Every police officer and fire fighter is trained in basic EMT skills. Many ambulance companies and a great many fire departments have trauma-equipped vehicles with equipment that outshines hospital emergency rooms of only a decade or two ago. Advanced EMT skills are unbelievably better than 30 or 40 years ago .. many EMT’s have skills equal or better than licensed physicians for the critical stabilization and transport phase of emergency care .. the critical “Golden Hour”. It cost a _lot_ of money to develop tis capability and yet who among us would begrudge a dollar of that investment? It was needed, it pays dividends in both the humanitarian as well as the economic sense and few, if any states and counties are pulling bask … EMS critical care is improving year after year.
Back in the send the hearse days a reason many people died before treatment was lack of communication … an accident miles from the nearest fixed, wired telephone could take many critical minutes just to get the initial word to responders. Today, that issue is basically solved. Nearly everyone has their cell phone, able to summon aid in seconds rather than minutes or hours.
But rapid notification is worthless if responders can’t be sent to the right location. That’s why the FCC took their action years ago, to try to close this critical gap.
So, what’s the holdup? well it isn’t really technology. Although few cell phones are currently equipped with GPS, _all_ cell phones work by communicating with a tower .. a cell site .. whose location is already accurately known. Standard, commercial-off-the-shelf cell phone provider equipment can not only tell from which site the call is coming but can give much more accurate location based on the cell phone signal strength, reception from other towers (triangulation) and even pinpoint direction of the calling phone from the active tower.
The FBI is routinely using this information to assist in crime fighting. No phone company can disregard a court order to provide this information to law enforcement and, according to many privacy advocates, some providers are all to eager to play junior G man and provide the data without court order.
So isn’t the law of the land at least as important as a court order from a law enforcement agency trying to catch a bank robber or prevent an act of terrorism? Personally, I think it is.
this sad state of affairs .. public safety agencies and cell carriers pushing back against a known life saving Federal regulation has gone far enough. Write your representatives and tell them that saving the life of a person mangled in a car wreck is _at_least- as important as conducting hearings on what Karl Rove said or didn’t say, much more critical than arguing if the president made a mistake with intelligence information or doctored the information before a war that’s already years old. I’m a history major and interested in the past, but the time has come to get or legislators and our cell phone companies off their asses and concern themselves with the present.