When 911 calls fail

Please HN, there are a few comments in this thread talking about &quot;taking action&quot; if you happen to be a bystander during an emergency.<p>Let me implore you. If the area isn&#x27;t safe, do not even attempt to enter the scene. Fires can instantly flare up and engulf a room in seconds. Rivers can be so cold they cause shock upon entering the water and, in some cases, they cause cardiac arrest. Tiny pieces of broken glass can cause deep, sometimes life-threatening lacerations. An accident on the side of the road can immediately escalate into a multi-vehicle incident if another driver doesn&#x27;t pay attention.<p>What we don&#x27;t want to happen is for you, the hero, to become another patient. Not only are you putting your life in danger, you&#x27;re also increasing the risk for your rescuers as well.<p>What you can do is this:<p>1. Secure the scene. If the accident occurred at the side of the road, park behind the accident and turn your hazards on. Wave at traffic to slow down and be cautious around the accident. If there is a house fire, try to find the gas shut-off valve and turn it off.<p>2. Assist the location of the scene. It&#x27;s often difficult for EMS to locate the scene of the emergency. Standing near the front of the building or the entrance to the parking lot and flagging the ambulance&#x2F;PD&#x2F;fire down helps a ton. Leading them directly to the scene is just as important.<p>3. Use your common sense. Don&#x27;t let the panic take hold of you. Be rational, reasonable. I&#x27;m not saying you should never try to help someone, just make sure that YOU are safe FIRST before heading in to assist.<p>I hold EMT&#x2F;Paramedic certs and volunteer in my spare time.<p>Thanks.<p>Edit: I also want to point out that there is generally very little anyone can do aside from basic management of the ABC&#x27;s (airway, breathing and circulation) without equipment. Some of that equipment is located onboard a fire truck or an ambulance. Most of that equipment is usually found inside the operating room of your local hospital. The faster the patient is moved safely to the local ED, the better it is.

I started the first VoIP 9-1-1 service for providers. 9-1-1 and similar emergency response services are a great boon. Something most people just take for granted and figure it just works like magic. The job those people have is mostly thankless and comes with killer stress. (Listening to a few recordings, I&#x27;d have a breakdown within a day on that job.)<p>On a more HN-note, I saw an interesting glimpse into how some of the responders view privacy. In context of what to do for VoIP phones, the general feeling at one NENA meeting was &quot;ISPs should provide detailed location information on any access lines to VoIP devices&quot;. The implication there is that any software on your computer or network would be able to do a real &quot;geo IP&quot; lookup because your ISP would have to provide your address of record to anything using the connection. No one seemed to realise the massive problem this would create.<p>The other interesting thing is that PSAPs are heading towards an interconnected model. The idea being (at least a few years ago) that PSAPs could all be on the Internet, and transfer calls to each other with SIP + some nutty extensions, bridge in translators, a real utopia. Which sounds nice until you realise so many PSAPs are woefully underfunded and in no position to be running critical infrastructure on the Internet. Hopefully states would step up and provide adequate funding and it could be pulled off as a government project. But it&#x27;s not so clear, and there&#x27;s a long way to go. One PSAP told us he didn&#x27;t want us sending calls from &quot;Internet phones&quot; because his PSAP equipment might get a virus (over his voice line.)

This is why some states have chosen to go with a single PSAP for the whole state - Cellular E911 has a couple problems, one - the geolocation features of cell phones is best effort, and if it fails, the best the company can do is guess from which site&#x2F;sector the call is coming in on to route them to the correct PSAP. Two - the cellular networks on whole are best effort, cellular as a technology cannot be as reliable as a wireline hookup, period.<p>In the future, I believe the move to VoLTE will make E911 more reliable, as it will enable more location data to be sent from the handset at the time of call, but until then, the most reliable way to get geolocation data to a PSAP is to use a landline, period, the landline telephone, is and will remain more reliable, consistent and predictable than any of the technologies replacing it.<p>As far as why the carrier couldnt be reached? likely calling the wrong place - Sprint FWIW is and has been in the midst of a forklift network upgrade for a couple years now, its just wrapping up now, but parts of the network have been partially non-functional for hours or days at a time - I know however that regular e911 drive testing is a part of test and turnup, and the planned maintenance process for Sprint.

911 for mobile is hard. Just routing to the right PSAP is tough. In the early days of cellular, California originally routed all cellular 911 calls to the California Highway Patrol, on the grounds that someone was probably calling from a car. The CHP ended up running a sizable call center to redirect emergency calls.<p>Only recently did most phones have GPS capability. Picking the PSAP based on cell tower gets you to roughly the right place, but PSAPs have to have really good handoff capability to nearby jurisdictions, and some of them don&#x27;t.<p>All this is a separate issue from calling 911 and not getting any answer. That&#x27;s a serious carrier failure and should be treated as such.

Interesting - carriers need to <i>..track callers to within 50 meters horizontally and 3 meters vertically</i><p>This poses a problem in dense urban areas with high-rise buildings. The private sector companies mentioned in the article who &quot;zipping ahead&quot; of carriers can provide an altitude using things like wifi tracking, but that still needs to be cross-referenced to an actual floor number. (Keep in mind some buildings don&#x27;t have a 13th floor, etc.) Barometers in phones don&#x27;t work well indoors either...<p>So, this may be a case where an FCC regulation is next to impossible to meet, unless someone can figure out how to map altitudes to actual building floor numbers at scale. Seems like that would be pretty labor intensive effort...

I understand that it&#x27;s a good idea keep the local (10-digit) numbers in your phone for the police and fire departments where you live and work. See, for example the San Francisco PD web site <a href="http://www.sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=38" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sf-police.org&#x2F;index.aspx?page=38</a> which notes, &quot;When calling 911 on a cellular phone near a highway, the call is connected to The California Highway Patrol (CHP) dispatch center.&quot;

<i>Leneweaver attempted to track down Sprint employees about the outage, but couldn&#x27;t reach anyone at the company.<p>[...]<p>Two weeks later, Leneweaver got in touch with the company.</i><p>Erm, how is this okay?

I have had this experience in Maryland in 2009. Luckily it wasn&#x27;t a very serious emergency in then end. There was a small explosion in our heater and I smelled smoke, so I wanted the fire department to check it out. I called 911 repeatedly on my cell and repeatedly got a busy signal, finally I went back in the house, got out my computer (before smart phones) and looked up the local fire department number. After they arrived they asked me if I called 911, and I said I couldn&#x27;t get through and they said I needed to keep trying so they had it for their records?!? The fact that they asked sort of implies that this happens often (or maybe they just knew that I had called directly). It was a weird experience, and turned out that I was lucky that the heater hadn&#x27;t completely exploded. I definitely don&#x27;t think I will ever trust 911 again.

The title should be clearer: E911 is not 911. This is why we still have an overpriced landline at my home.

I am on Sprint, would like to test my 9-1-1 coverage, but unsure how without making a false 9-1-1 call.

What about setting up the phones so that dialling 911&#x2F;999 etc shows the current GPS co-ordinates on the phone screen (on phones that GPS enabled).<p>That or even a button on the screen that will &quot;read&quot; them to the telephone operator at the other end.

This looks like an opportunity for an app. Your phone has GPS and a better idea of where you are than the cell network. What if you could open a 911 app, tick a few check boxes (Is this a medical emergency? violent situation? Do you require an ambulance, fire truck, and&#x2F;or police?), and it would post your GPS coordinates and your cell number. The local dispatch office would than automatically call you and hook you up with a dispatcher who gets the details.

The main image say &quot;911, what&#x27;s your emergency?&quot;, but in my experience they have always intro&#x27;d with &quot;911, where is your emergency?&quot;. I wonder if there was a protocol change where they figured that the location was the most important piece of information in case the phone call got cut short.

This is just crazy, the FCC keeping quiet is quite unbelievable.

Fascinating, never thought about these implications before for network carriers.

This may be slightly off-topic, but it&#x27;s also important.<p>911 is not there to help you. You need to know how to help yourself.<p>My story - Interstate 880 in the East Bay, Fremont, CA. Not a desolate stretch of highway, not in the middle of nowhere (I mean, Fremont sucks but...)<p>I saw an SUV swerve and then roll in front of me on the highway. Took out 2 other cars as well. Slid on its roof about 50 feet then stopped. Gasoline, debris, and fruit (it was carrying fruit?) strewn about the Freeway.<p>Tons of people pull over. Insanity.<p>The car is still running, and gas is pouring out of the SUV. A bystander and myself get the passengers out. They&#x27;re unconscious. I recognize the danger of moving them, but the fire danger was very real.<p>Anyway, long story short -- guy goes into shock. Pisses himself, won&#x27;t respond.<p>15 people had called 911.<p>Elapsed time? 20 minutes.<p>Still not a single local PD, Firetruck, or CHP officer.<p>The first officer was DRIVING BY on the freeway and didn&#x27;t know the accident had even happened.<p>Imagine that was your wife, your son, your partner, your family.<p>We had a nurse stop and give care. We also had a contractor who had a box of flares stop and close lanes for us. This was all citizens doing work.<p>Shortly after this incident, I bought a handgun. Because I knew when seconds count, the police&#x2F;fire&#x2F;emt are MINUTES away.<p>(I also took medical course)