Gilroy
– Starting Thursday, cell phone calls to 9-1-1 will be connected
directly to Gilroy dispatchers, instead of being routed to a
California Highway Patrol center located 35 miles away, perhaps
saving lives.
By Lori Stuenkel
Gilroy – Starting Thursday, cell phone calls to 9-1-1 will be connected directly to Gilroy dispatchers, instead of being routed to a California Highway Patrol center located 35 miles away, perhaps saving lives.
The switch, several years in the making, will likely keep hundreds of emergency calls in this city – instead of routing them to Monterey – streamlining the dispatch process and shaving precious seconds off response times.
“The advantage is, there’s lots of people out there with cell phones, a lot of people don’t have hard line phones anymore,” said Steve Ynzunza, 9-1-1 dispatch supervisor for the Gilroy Police Department.
Now, cell phone users can call 9-1-1 directly and get the same emergency dispatch service as regular phone users.
Based on the 5 to 10 percent increase in 9-1-1 calls experienced by other cities that have made the switch, Ynzunza said, Gilroy police and fire dispatchers could handle several hundred more calls each month.
Six different wireless companies service Gilroy and the county, including Verizon, Cingular, Sprint, Nextel, Metro PCS, and T-Mobile. Each has its own network of towers with slight differences in technology used for handling cellular calls.
The new cell phone 9-1-1 dispatch will be rolled out in two phases with each wireless company. Verizon and Cingular/AT&T Wireless are testing both phases with Gilroy police dispatchers Thursday. Other providers will make the switch during the coming month, but some might not have phase two up and running for several more months, Ynzunza said.
In phase one, the wireless providers supply call centers with the 10-digit cell phone number, the subscriber’s name, and the location of the cell tower nearest the caller.
In phase two, dispatchers get a more exact location, with the caller’s longitude and latitude, and a percentage of accuracy for that location. Eventually, the city dispatchers’ mapping system will automatically pinpoint the location on a map, but for now, it will have to be entered manually.
If the cell phone caller is on the move, the dispatcher can re-transmit, or re-bid, the call.
“Say you’ve been on a call for 30 seconds … it re-bids them into the system and gives an updated location,” Ynzunza said.
Another bonus to phase two is that it can help when emergency responders will need to conduct a search – for lost hikers, for example, or for a suspect a witness might be calling in to describe.
No matter where the 9-1-1 call is routed, the agency that answers will confirm the wireless provider’s information with the caller, including name and location, and will determine the type of emergency.
Until Thursday, any cell phone caller with an emergency who wanted to reach Gilroy police or fire immediately had to call the agencies’ direct lines, rather than 9-1-1. Any cellular 9-1-1 call automatically went to the CHP in Monterey.
“(The CHP) determines the location that they’re calling from, and then they determine if it’s theirs, and they handle it, or if it’s Gilroy’s, they transfer the call over to us,” Ynzunza said.
About year ago, Ynzunza said, the city and the California Highway Patrol got together to decide which cell towers would continue to direct 9-1-1 calls to the CHP dispatch center in Monterey, and which towers would connect 9-1-1 calls to Gilroy dispatchers.
“For highway patrol, their main objective was, if it’s close to a freeway, they’re going to keep it,” Ynzunza said.
He did not know how many cell towers total are in the city, but each vendor generally has no more than one tower near the freeway that will stay with CHP.
There are two different types of towers in town. One type has a roughly 2-mile radius, so all calls within that area will go either to local police, or highway patrol. The second type of tower breaks up its service radius into different sections. If a tower is between the city and the freeway, for example, calls from phones on the freeway would go to CHP while calls on the other side of the tower would go to GPD.
“It really depends on the wireless provider,” Ynzunza said.
Most of the costs associated with the switch have fallen on the wireless providers, to ensure the towers are ready for phases one and two. GPD’s costs are limited to software upgrades and some additional training, but the department will be reimbursed for any costs through the state. The GPD is upgrading its software Thursday to be able to handle 10-digit numbers and receive calls from any cell phone within city limits, no matter what the area code.
The federal government is partly responsible for spurring the switch to phase two and locally-handled 9-1-1 calls, Ynzunza said, but most communities are recognizing the need to accommodate the not-so-new technology.
“It’s actually being done on a nation-wide level,” Ynzunza said. “We have to do it, because now those phones are out there. …. We’re talking wireless right now, and the next step is voice over Internet protocol, where people can use their phone from their computer. So now we’ve got to say, ‘How do we take those calls?’ It’s becoming a big issue, because if you call from your computer, where are you at?”
