6 ms·

I called 911 from my cell phone for a carbon monoxide detector incident and they had no idea where I was. I was transferred around multiple times and gave my ad

by nsxwolf 11y ago

I called 911 from my cell phone for a carbon monoxide detector incident and they had no idea where I was. I was transferred around multiple times and gave my address more than once. It took multiple minutes to get the call completed and it was probably at least 10 minutes before the fire department arrived. Contrast that with my childhood neigbor pranking 911 from my home phone in the early 80s. The police knew where the call came from and showed up promptly.

ssully 11y ago
Similar situation. Came home to my house broken into, backdoor was completely smashed in, luckily the robbers were gone. When I called 911 from my cell I got an operator from a neighboring town; my house is on the border of a major US city and some small neighboring towns. While they were trying to transfer me I just went inside and used my landline and got connected before they finished transferring.
morgante 11y ago
When was this? Wireless E911 is still relatively recent.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  About 2 years ago.
VLM 11y ago
The problem with anecdote collection as a tool to compare to across eras is the pre-social media pre-internet pre-wireless world had 911 problems, but they'll never be documented and are lost in the ether. Did my deceased for 20 years grandma have problems connecting via 911 when calling an ambulance for my deceased for 30 years grandfather? Well, maybe, but who will ever know? However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy. All of them. Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails. Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about. There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones. No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn't have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...) I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency. The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.
- nsxwolf 11y ago
  Well before cell phones I had assumed 911 was nearly perfectly reliable and could only get better with new technology. Random news stories about dispatchers screwing up didn't do much to shake me of that belief. I think it goes without saying that cell phones were a very real regression for 911.
xanderstrike 11y ago
That's very strange. I called 911 about a motorcycle accident a couple months ago. I was on the freeway and not sure exactly where I was, I said something like "101 somewhere between LA and the valley? I don't know I wasn't watching the exit signs." They were immediately able to locate me, I assume from my phone's geolocation, and CHP was there in minutes.
- fspeech 11y ago
  Locating you on a freeway (a 1d constraint) is a lot easier than locating a residence (a 2d or 3d constraint).
  - ams6110 11y ago
    When I start up Google Maps on my phone it pinpoints my location to my house. 911 service also activates the GPS, so why would it be any less accurate? Haven't had a landline in years. I don't smoke, I don't binge drink. Hoping these stats don't end up affecting my insurance premiums.
    - nonbel 11y ago
      People without landlines seemed to be healthier, if anything: "Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good, more likely to have met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic activity (based on leisure-time activity), and less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes." http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201512.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
    - fspeech 11y ago
      911 services should use Google Maps! Seriously, this is a non-trivial problem. GPS data alone does not have the precision. However from all the data that Google has collected from driving those mapping vans around, Google should have accurate topography data (elevation is important for making GPS more precise for non planar geographies) and should have building locations through, say, visual analysis of the street photos. With the additional inputs it can make a better guess of your most likely location. The improvement is probabilistic, not guaranteed. And it is only available if your phone is capable of communicating at the right level with the service (provided by your app in the Google Maps case) that has the enhanced information. But even then, in multi-story buildings GPS may be hard to acquire in the first place. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanced_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... for general information.
ryan-c 11y ago
Do not call 911 from your cell phone if you are at home. You'll most likely (at least in the bay area) get CHP, and their dispatch center frequently has hold times of several minutes. More than enough time for it to be too late. Instead, you should add the local emergency dispatch numbers to your phone as contacts. You can call the police station and ask for it - also ask them when it would be okay for you to call emergency dispatch to verify it routes correctly. A lot of bay area numbers are listed here: http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_cellphone_numbers.doc http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_... Please stop what you are doing right now and program in the dispatch numbers for where you live and work.

by nsxwolf 11y ago

ssully 11y ago

Similar situation. Came home to my house broken into, backdoor was completely smashed in, luckily the robbers were gone. When I called 911 from my cell I got an operator from a neighboring town; my house is on the border of a major US city and some small neighboring towns. While they were trying to transfer me I just went inside and used my landline and got connected before they finished transferring.

morgante 11y ago

When was this? Wireless E911 is still relatively recent.

nsxwolf 11y ago
About 2 years ago.

VLM 11y ago

The problem with anecdote collection as a tool to compare to across eras is the pre-social media pre-internet pre-wireless world had 911 problems, but they'll never be documented and are lost in the ether. Did my deceased for 20 years grandma have problems connecting via 911 when calling an ambulance for my deceased for 30 years grandfather? Well, maybe, but who will ever know? However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy. All of them. Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails. Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about. There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones. No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn't have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...) I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency. The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.

nsxwolf 11y ago
Well before cell phones I had assumed 911 was nearly perfectly reliable and could only get better with new technology. Random news stories about dispatchers screwing up didn't do much to shake me of that belief. I think it goes without saying that cell phones were a very real regression for 911.

xanderstrike 11y ago

That's very strange. I called 911 about a motorcycle accident a couple months ago. I was on the freeway and not sure exactly where I was, I said something like "101 somewhere between LA and the valley? I don't know I wasn't watching the exit signs." They were immediately able to locate me, I assume from my phone's geolocation, and CHP was there in minutes.

fspeech 11y ago
Locating you on a freeway (a 1d constraint) is a lot easier than locating a residence (a 2d or 3d constraint).
- ams6110 11y ago
  When I start up Google Maps on my phone it pinpoints my location to my house. 911 service also activates the GPS, so why would it be any less accurate? Haven't had a landline in years. I don't smoke, I don't binge drink. Hoping these stats don't end up affecting my insurance premiums.
  - nonbel 11y ago
    People without landlines seemed to be healthier, if anything: "Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good, more likely to have met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic activity (based on leisure-time activity), and less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes." http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless201512.pdf http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
  - fspeech 11y ago
    911 services should use Google Maps! Seriously, this is a non-trivial problem. GPS data alone does not have the precision. However from all the data that Google has collected from driving those mapping vans around, Google should have accurate topography data (elevation is important for making GPS more precise for non planar geographies) and should have building locations through, say, visual analysis of the street photos. With the additional inputs it can make a better guess of your most likely location. The improvement is probabilistic, not guaranteed. And it is only available if your phone is capable of communicating at the right level with the service (provided by your app in the Google Maps case) that has the enhanced information. But even then, in multi-story buildings GPS may be hard to acquire in the first place. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanced_911 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... for general information.

ryan-c 11y ago

Do not call 911 from your cell phone if you are at home. You'll most likely (at least in the bay area) get CHP, and their dispatch center frequently has hold times of several minutes. More than enough time for it to be too late. Instead, you should add the local emergency dispatch numbers to your phone as contacts. You can call the police station and ask for it - also ask them when it would be okay for you to call emergency dispatch to verify it routes correctly. A lot of bay area numbers are listed here: http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_cellphone_numbers.doc http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_... Please stop what you are doing right now and program in the dispatch numbers for where you live and work.