New technology pinpoints emergency calls

PALMER -- Global-positioning satellites and state-of-the-art cell phones will soon be used to determine exact locations of all 911 calls within the Mat-Su Borough.

Within a year, emergency dispatchers in Palmer will see all incoming cellular calls show up on detailed computer maps, enabling them to dispatch appropriate personnel to exact locations.

Currently, emergency dispatchers can only track the location of calls placed from a wire line. According to Dennis Brodigan, the borough's director of emergency services, the expanded project will enable the borough to track the longitude and latitude of cellular calls by the summer or fall of 2005.

"This is important," Brodigan said, "because in the past we have experienced situations where cellular callers, who are unfamiliar with the area, have called and they can't tell dispatchers their location. This will alleviate that possibility."

The entire project is part of a national mandate by the Federal Communications Commission's Enhanced 911 Act, requiring all emergency dispatches to track cellular 911 calls.

The borough's emergency services department took several crucial steps, last week, toward this goal by upgrading hardware and software for the Enhanced-911 center, located at the Palmer Police Department.

With this technology in place, the borough paved the way for phase two, in which the borough plans to upgrade the location information at Matanuska Telephone Association and make further improvements at the Palmer dispatch center.

The 12-year-old Palmer center was due for an upgrade. The current system tracks the location and identification of 911 calls dialed from wire lines but no cellular information is available, apart from caller identification.

The entire project will cost the borough $298,306 for equipment and services, which are being provided through Nine-One-One Inc., a Colorado- based company.

The project is part of a larger task: providing more effective emergency response throughout the borough. Earlier this year, borough public works employees began ensuring that all public and private roads within the borough are clearly marked and labeled.

This entailed replacing signs that were stolen from their posts and placing new signs on roads that have not had signs in the past. Additionally, the borough has renamed a number of streets that had the same or very similar names, thereby reducing confusion during an emergency response.

According to Brodigan, all cell-phone providers in the state will be required to sell phones with GPS capacity by January 2005, meaning individuals will not be able to purchase phones that cannot be tracked through global-positioning satellites.

"It would defeat the purpose of the law if anyone side-stepped the issue," Brodigan said.

Brodigan said he believes the phones will only have tracking capabilities when 911 is dialed.

Contact Joel Davidson at joel.davidson@frontiersman.com.