Short introduces Phase II wireless 911


Emergency Management Director Brian Short introduced the Henderson City Council to Phase II of wireless 911 capability at Monday night’s meeting.

In a PowerPoint presentation, Short outlined problems that have occurred in the past with locating 911 calls made from cellular telephones.

During Phase I of the project, 911 could only derive callback numbers and cellular telephone towers from which calls were relayed. This gave emergency services a three-mile radius of where a victim might be.

As of February 1 of this year, Phase II of the project was deployed. The 911 call center in Vance County can now get the latitude and longitude of the caller. A computer processes the information sent from the cell phone and superimposes the location of the caller on a map with aerial photographs of the city and county.

These maps can be as detailed as one inch to one hundred feet.

The tracking system can locate a cell phone from five to one hundred feet of its actual location and can be as accurate as one foot.

According to Short, it can also track a caller in motion.

The Emergency Management Director told Council members that the system had been tested on employees and found to be very accurate.

Short stated that the benefits of the system “can be endless”. He noted that people lost in the woods could now be found, whereas before at least one party to the call had to know their location before they could be retrieved.

The Director said that he would be meeting with Sheriff Peter White and Henderson Chief of Police Keith Sidwell to see how each would like to “incorporate” the new technology.

Short also noted that the system could be useful in revealing “call pockets” when attempting to identify locations that generate specific types of 911 calls.

The technology can also be used to put call locators in police cars. Short told the Council that the system could do away with traditional patrol districts. With locators in patrol cars, 911 calls would automatically be dispatched to the closest available car.

Short noted that the Phase II wireless system covered the whole of Vance County, utilizing every provider and every existing cellular telephone tower.

After a question by Henderson City Council member Bobby Gupton as to how information is communicated between the cell phone and the 911 call center, Short explained that while the caller receives only voice, the 911 end of the call receives both voice and data, similar to what Short called a 911 “wire call”.

The Emergency Director told the Council that the system was paid for out of wireless surcharge money that is charged to every cell phone customer. No local tax dollars were spent on the project.

After a question by Council member Elissa Yount, Short acknowledged that Vance was one of the few counties “of our population density” with the system in place.

Henderson Mayor Clem Seifert commented that the system should be a selling point in promoting the area.

When asked by Seifert what it would take for the City and County to use the “close car” technology, Short replied that it would involve a “substantial hardware expenditure”. This would include terminals for each car, a GPS antenna, and the necessary software. He stated that officers would do their own dispatch, assign their own case numbers, and get full call histories, among other perks, if there system were in place.

Short said that he would shortly be exploring “multi-jurisdictional” grants for the Henderson Police Department and the Vance County Sheriff’s Office, his reasoning being that funding was more likely if a “team effort” was shown.

The Emergency Management Director ended his presentation by emphasizing that not all cell phones are Phase II compatible. He said that his department is launching a public relations campaign to make the public aware of the fact that telephones made before 2003 may not work with the Phase II wireless 911 system. He said that an object of his campaign was to make people aware of what the telephones can do.