DT5Y@cornella.bitnet (Peter Fleszar) (08/08/89)
Hello net_peoples, I have a question concerning 911 laws and practices and the meaning of life in general. Some of us know that some huge metropolises such as Ithaca have no 911 service, and that anyone who dials 911 on a phone in such benighted areas as this is given to the regular telephone company operator off in the Twilight Zone somewhere. Now, small counties like Tompkins (Ithaca) and Cortland (nearby, where I live) typically have a centralized dispatcher for fire and ambulance, usually accessible from one phone number in the entire county. The dispatcher also can call out on the inter-agency police frequency and (in Cortland at least) can call on the sheriff's and city police frequencies (yes, two, one for each. Imagine! :-) ). Now, what is wrong with telling the local telco to route 911 calls to the Fire Control dispatcher instead of the telephone operator? (Other than that it makes too much sense, of course...) There was an unfortunate incident here last year when someone who had just arrived from New York City was being threatened - she called 911 like she was taught back in grade school, but it took something like 90 minutes for the cry for help to circulate among the telebureaucrats and police agencies. But the city police did arrive - just in time to call the coroner. I realize that the 911 cobbing together I envision would not be a complete substitute for a 'real' 911 dispatching system, but why wouldn't it make a good alternative for travelers and others ignorant of the 'proper' numbers? Pete N. Peter Fleszar, KB2CCL dt5y@cornella.bitnet dt5y@cornella.cit.cornell.edu 'Always peek before you poke.' Acknowledge-To: <DT5Y@CORNELLA>
davef@brspyr1.brs.com (Dave Fiske) (08/09/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0280m02@vector.dallas.tx.us>, DT5Y@cornella.bitnet (Peter Fleszar) writes: >Hello net_peoples, I have a question concerning 911 laws and practices >and the meaning of life in general. Some of us know that some huge >metropolises such as Ithaca have no 911 service, and that anyone who Heck, we don't have it in Albany/Schenectady/Troy! Albany itself is over 100,000 in population, and the Tri-City Area is around a quarter million. I just checked the front pages of the phone book, and they have 7-digit numbers listed for the local police departments. The only exception in this area is Saratoga County, which set up an Enhanced 911 system last year. Calls to 911 generate a name/address display on a computer terminal at the dispatcher's end. However, many towns in Saratoga are rural, and people didn't have street numbers, just RFD-type addresses. So first they had to try and find everybody, and assign them street numbers and addresses, so emergency workers would have someplace to show up at. (Recently, officials have been complaining, too, that people are not using the 911 system enough, considering the expense the County went to to do it. They speculate that people don't think their emergencies are important enough to use it!) A slightly humorous incident happened due to Albany's lack of 911 service. Around 6 years ago, I was working at the Albany Urban Renewal Agency, a unit of the city government which is located in a building other than city hall. All City offices were on the same PBX, however. One time an employee at Urban Renewal accidentally sprayed her eyes with an aerosol glue can, and one of the ladies who staffed the phones decided to call the Fire Rescue Squad. Well, she did what she thought was the quickest thing--dial 'O'. This connected her to the City Hall Operator, who was told that the Fire Department was needed at Urban Renewal. Well, the City Hall operators were probably little old ladies who had been hired thanks to their husbands' political backgrounds, and had never even set foot at Urban Renewal. For whatever reason, they told the Fire Department to go to 119 Washington Avenue, instead of the correct address of 155. Well, 119 had been a city-owned building, and they HAD considered locating Urban Renewal there years previously, but it ended up as some other offices, with a McDonalds on the ground floor. A few of us decided to go out on the sidewalk in order to guide the rescue workers to the right office, but instead we saw a fire truck pass us by, heading down to the McDonalds. We didn't know if it was meant for us, or if there was a fire down there. It just so happened that one of my co-workers was coming back from lunch, saw us running around, and figured something was wrong. So he waved down a cop who happened to be passing, who said the call had been for 119 Washington Avenue. At this point the woman who had come out of the building with me started yelling, "No, we never moved there. They just thought about moving us there!" Finally, we convinced the cop that the fire truck was supposed to be responding to us, and he relayed the information by radio. Luckily, the woman with the glue hadn't really been injured badly--mainly, she had glued her eyelids shut, but because she couldn't see, she had thought she'd blinded herself. She was treated briefly at the Emergency Room, and was back at work the next day. When you consider that this scenario could have involved some actual disaster, you can see how important 911 can be. -- "MAN USES TAPE TO STICK Dave Fiske (davef@brspyr1.BRS.COM) HIS TOE BACK ON!" Home: David_A_Fiske@cup.portal.com Headline from Weekly World News CIS: 75415,163 GEnie: davef
amanda@uunet.uu.net (Amanda Walker) (08/09/89)
In article <telecom-v09i0281m05@vector.dallas.tx.us>, davef@brspyr1.brs.com (Dave Fiske) writes: > [incident with rescue squad being sent to the wrong address] > When you consider that this scenario could have involved some actual > disaster, you can see how important 911 can be. Even so, there's still the possibility for human error--there was a sad story on the DC news recently about a person who died because the ambulance that had been dispatched on the 911 call was sent to the wrong quadrant of the city (NE instead of NW). (For those of you who aren't familiar with DC, most addresses occur 4 times, so you have to tack the quadrant [NW/NE/SE/SW] onto the address to fully specify a location.) Luckily, most cities are laid out a little less symmetrically than DC... -- Amanda Walker InterCon Systems Corporation -- amanda@intercon.uu.net | ...!uunet!intercon!amanda