THE FUTURE AS SEEN THROUGH TECHNOLOGY

Technologists in the area of emergency services can take comfort and pride in knowing the technology they bring to market has saved lives and will continue to save lives. However, sometimes the users of technology — as well as those responsible for regulation and sometimes those most affected by a technology — must be innovative as well.

And so it is regarding E911. Since enhanced 911 was first introduced, companies and regulators have been striving to improve it. It hasn't always been a smooth process, but innovation on several levels has kept this important technology moving forward.

For example, take those who answer the calls that telephony, routing, location and database technologies ultimately deliver. “They have to rely on processes, intuition and sometimes just their hard determination to solve problems that the technology sometimes creates for them,” said Tim Lorello, senior vice president of TCS Telecommunications Systems, at a National Press Club conference last month in Washington.

According to a report in March from the General Accounting Office, operators answer 200 million E911 calls per year, 82 million of which are from wireless users. So it's no surprise they have learned how to improvise.

Jason Connell works the midnight shift at a call center in western Massachusetts, Lorello said, and saved the life of a potential suicide victim. After receiving a call from a distraught father with little more information than his son was in trouble, the make of car and a cell phone number, Connell made the connection between that call and another received from a woman worried about her boyfriend. They were calling about the same man. By getting the Massachusetts and Vermont State Police and the wireless operator involved, they traced the call and location of the man and stopped him before he jumped into the bay.

What is key to this story is that the man had been driving in an area supported by a Phase II wireless E911 implementation, which can place a user within 50 to 150 meters. If he had been driving in an area served by Phase I technology, the results may have been different.

Innovation on the part of legislators also kept the technology moving forward. A little more than four years ago, Senators Conrad Burns (R-Mont.), Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), John Shimkus (R-Ill.) and Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.) formed the Congressional E911 caucus. In December 2004, they helped pass the Enhanced 9-1-1 Act, which established — among other things — the first federal grant program for E911, from which local public-safety answering points (PSAPs) could draw money to upgrade their facilities.

Innovation on a personal level has also helped. Gregory Rhode, president of consulting firm Ecopernicus, told the story of how after New Yorker David Kuhn's daughter was murdered in 1993, a state fund was created to raise money for PSAPs to upgrade their systems. When Kuhn discovered the funds were being diverted for other state purposes, he ran against the state senator responsible and won.