NATION NOW

911’s deadly flaw: Lack of location data

John Kelly and Brendan Keefe

As water filled her sinking SUV, Shanell Anderson tried the doors. They wouldn’t budge. She dialed 911 on her cellphone, telling the operator exactly where she was.

Anderson, 31, was delivering newspapers near Atlanta around 4 a.m. that day in late December, so she knew the cross streets, even the ZIP code. She repeated her location over and over, but it didn’t help.

Because Anderson’s call was routed through the nearest cellphone tower to a neighboring county’s 911 system, the dispatcher couldn’t find the streets on her maps. Worse, the system couldn’t get a fix on the cellphone’s location before the call ended. In the agonizing final seconds of the call, Anderson’s words are muffled by the sounds of pond water. The dispatcher asks for the address again, then utters, “I lost her.”

It took 20 minutes for rescuers to get to Anderson and pull the 31-year old suburban Atlanta woman from her car, barely alive. She died a week and a half later in the hospital.

Her 911 call was one of millions that fail to give police, fire and ambulance dispatchers a quick fix on location, a technology shortfall that can leave callers in grave danger.

In an era when your mobile phone can tell Facebook, Uber or even video games where you’re located — with amazing accuracy — 911 operators are often left in the dark.

Your chance of 911 getting a quick fix on location ranges from as low as 10 percent to as high as 95 percent, according to hundreds of pages of local, state and federal documents obtained and reviewed by USA Today and more than 40 Gannett newspapers and television stations across the country.

Ohio and nationwide

In Ohio, 72 percent of the 7.5 million calls to 911 centers were from wireless phones in 2012, a volume nearly 24 percent higher than in 2010, according to the Ohio Department of Administrative Services.

In Muskingum County, 75 percent of the nearly 60,000 calls to 911 made to the Muskingum County Sheriff’s Office and Zanesville Police Department were made from mobile phones, Director of Operations Kim Hambel said.

The exact number of calls that provide exact GPS information, as opposed to those that need to have location information requested again, or “rebid,” is unknown, Hambel said, but the process rarely gives officials any problems.

“It is a real simple task,” he said. “If the person is moving, we can rebid as many times as needed.”

In some counties, however, the lack of immediate GPS location is an issue. Last year in Madison County, which has a population of around 43,000, 78 percent of 911 calls were from cellphones. Of those, only 26 percent provided a cell tower location, Sheriff Jim Sabin reported in a December letter to the Federal Communications Commission.

“It is offensive to think that with the technology that exists, over a quarter of the cellphone calls coming into our call center do not have dispatchable addresses. ... This poses a real problem for our dispatchers, deputies and other first responder teams when we are trying to help citizens,” Sabin wrote.

Those figures are typical of what’s documented by 911 officials in hundreds of other communities, according to local, state and federal government records. There is no mandate or standard for collection or study of 911 location data. The FCC doesn’t collect data, and neither do some 911 centers. That makes it difficult to look at consistent statistics from state to state.

Doing what they can

The FCC and the four largest cellphone carriers say they’re doing their best to address the problem. This month, they worked together on a new federal rule that requires carriers to steadily increase the percentage of cellphone calls to 911 that transmit location data.

The rules, crafted in part by the carriers, call for delivery of location data for 40 percent of cellphone calls by 2017 and 80 percent by 2021. While drafting the rule, the FCC and the companies said a higher success rate is not possible sooner, indicating the rate is below 40 percent in many communities.

David Simpson, chief of the FCC’s Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, acknowledged the system is not capable of solving the problem sooner. His agency’s mission instead was “to ensure there was a backstop of enforceable regulations that held them accountable for improving the indoor location accuracy challenge.”

The major cellphone carriers declined to answer questions. Their trade organization, CTIA-The Wireless Association, said that until recently, the cellphone-to-911 location technology being used was meant for outdoor use, and it doesn’t work as well indoors.

While the FCC is reviewing rules to force wireless providers to improve location accuracy, Ohio’s 911 steering committee is looking at other changes that would improve compatibility with new technology.

The committee is exploring the feasibility of bringing the state’s 325 individual 911 call centers onto a single Internet-based network, moving them from the archaic analog system.

Such a move would boost Ohio’s capabilities to interact with new smartphone and wireless technology. Although a test site has been developed in Morgan County, there is no timeline for when a switch to an Internet-based system will happen statewide.

Lingering problems

The delay in finding Shanell Anderson resulted from a combination of lingering problems involving cellphone calls to 911.

As her car sank in Cherokee County, Anderson’s phone connected via a tower in nearby Fulton County. She was talking to a 911 dispatcher in the wrong town. The call center’s computer maps didn’t show the streets Anderson kept repeating. It took minutes for emergency teams to realize what was happening, delaying firefighters’ response.

Most important, 911 never received location data from her cellphone before the line went dead.

“There are times when it doesn’t come up at all,” said Carl Hall, chief of technology at the Public Safety Department in Alpharetta, Georgia. “Every day, we receive calls where we get a (cell) tower address, and that’s it.”

When rescuers did arrive, they spotted the SUV’s still-burning headlights under water. A firefighter dived in and fished Anderson from the car. Medics restarted her heart, but comatose, she never recovered.

“If the phone had automatically routed to the correct jurisdiction, this very well may have had a different outcome,” Hall said.

Technical explanations are not good enough for Jacquene Curlee, Shanell’s mother, who said it’s “insane” that 911 can’t locate someone, considering the capabilities of smartphones.

“Why is it more important for a 99-cent app or Facebook to know where we are than the 911 operator who answers the call?” Curlee asked. “When you have GPS, when you have apps that have locator services, you’re telling me 911 doesn’t have the capability to locate someone?”

Getting a location

The 911 system was designed for landline telephones, transmitting your call and your location instantly over a hard-wired connection.

Today’s cellphone system does not automatically send location data when you dial 911. After the call comes in, the dispatcher’s computer transmits a digital request to the cellphone network seeking the phone’s location. The data exchange can take seconds or even minutes. Sometimes, it doesn’t return a location at all.

The most high-tech 911 centers automate the process, digitally requesting the location every few seconds. If the system can’t locate the device, cellphone carriers’ systems use nearby towers to estimate.

These methods sometimes do net location information later, although public records show some call centers see major gains as calls go on and others see only marginal improvement. Often, 911 calls end before that digital back-and-forth yields a specific location.

Your phone’s apps are connected directly to the phone’s GPS unit. The 911 system relies on getting that information through a relay process, although the FCC’s Simpson said the agency wants to work with companies such as Google and Uber to build a 911 app. Today’s focus is to make continuous improvements to “close the gap between Americans’ expectations of what 911 will do for them and what it can really do.”

Even when 911 gets a location, it can be wrong. Test calls by Gannett journalists working with 911 centers near Denver, Washington, Minneapolis and Charlotte resulted in no location or coordinates that were off by hundreds of feet.

Green Bay Police Chief Thomas Molitor wrote the FCC in December, saying public safety teams can’t act fast without a location, which they have with less frequency.

“An estimated 10,000 people each year would be saved with accurate location standards from indoor cellphone calls,” Molitor wrote, citing an FCC estimate of lives that could be saved by a one-minute reduction in emergency response times. “Whatever hang-ups they have cannot be more important than 10,000 lives.”

Contributing: Chris Vanderveen, of KUSA in Denver; Russ Ptacek and Erin Van der Bellen, of WUSA in Washington; Steve Eckert, of KARE in Minneapolis; Phillip Kish, of WXIA in Atlanta; Mike Deeson, of WTSP in Tampa; Michelle Boudin, of WCNC in Charlotte; and Anna Rumer, of The Times Recorder.

Improve your chances of being located

If you’re calling 911 from a mobile phone, most factors determining whether your device will be located by the dispatcher are outside your control. However, there are a few things that will increase the chance your call will be one that includes more precise location information:

•If you can get outside, do it. The biggest challenge in locating cellphone calls today is when they’re made from indoors, which makes them subject to more interference between the device and cellphone towers.

•Don’t assume 911 can find your phone, and you, just because you dialed. Be prepared to tell 911 as much as you can about your location.

•If you’re in a tall building, make sure to tell the 911 operator what floor you are on and what room number you are in. Even when it transmits your location, phones are not yet transmitting your altitude. In a big building, that could cost responders time.