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First Responders: Locating 911 Callers More Difficult With Cell Phones

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) -- Many homeowners are dumping their landlines and going completely wireless.

You can certainly save money that way, but first responders say it could come at a price.

Cell phone coverage has gotten so good that the question is no longer "can you hear me now?" It's "can you find me now?"

"We're having to locate you through the data we receive through the carriers," Chief Matt Brown with Allegheny Co. Emergency Service said.

Unlike your home phone, which comes up on the dispatchers' screen with an exact address.

"And we don't have to worry or decipher that as that 911 call comes in," Brown said.

The difference is response time. If the caller doesn't know where they are or can't verbalize their location, it can delay response by a few minutes.

"But just a few minutes in some of the things and incidents that we are dealing with could be critical," Brown said.

The problem with cell phone 911 calls is their inconsistency in pinpointing a person's location.

"We're about 40 percent, and that's not acceptable," Gary Thomas, Allegheny Co. 911 center manager, said.

With the other 60 percent of cell phone 911 calls, they could be nowhere close.

"The system is saying it's 90 percent confident that you are within 719 feet within the circumference of this circle," Thomas said.

An additional electronic inquiry might narrow it a bit.

"This caller here is telling me it's 90 percent confident you're within 98 feet, so we're getting better," Thomas said.

With the best case scenario, which they only see 40 percent of the time.

"See how tight the circle is? Now I'm 90 percent confident you are within 21 feet of that spot, so I think we can find you," Thomas said.

But it's not saying what floor of a building you might be on. The 911 Center has the equipment to handle much more finite information, and the carriers have that kind of information, but they aren't required to make it available to first responders until 2021.

However, in a dire emergency, the carriers can ping the cell phone to within a few feet. But...

"We have to fill out paperwork and fax it off to them, and they'll start pinging the phone," Thomas said.

And that doesn't happen quickly.

"It could be 5 to 10 minutes, 15 minutes before we get a response back from the carrier, which could mean life or death," Thomas said.

Five years from now, the almost-pinpoint accuracy you see on TV crime shows may be a reality for local dispatching, but that's five years away.

In the meantime, when asked whether keeping the landline or dumping it was the better choice, Brown and Thomas respectfully replied that's an individual decision by the consumer.

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