Emergency calls are in a state of fluctuation
CITYWIDE When a two-story warehouse in the Pico Neighborhood erupted in flames last month, next-door neighbor Todd Darling grabbed his cell phone and frantically dialed 911, only to be met with a recording for the California Highway Patrol.
“If you dial from a cell phone... you get a recording for CHP and routed around,” Darling said at the time. “So I dialed another number to get a hold of the fire department.”
It would have been a different story if Darling had ran back to his office and dialed 911 from a landline, being met with a Santa Monica Police Department dispatcher instead.
The answering agency — it’s the main difference separating 911 calls from a cell phone and a landline, the former answered by the California Highway Patrol, the latter by the Santa Monica Police Department, which after determining the nature of the call is fire related, would route the call to the Los Angeles Regional Dispatch Center.
Calling 911 from a cell phone is currently in a state of flux, with some 911 cell phone calls now being directly routed to the local agency rather than the California Highway Patrol, said Brian Humphrey, spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department, which partners with the Santa Monica Fire Department in using the regional dispatch center.
But in Santa Monica, all emergency 911 calls made from a cell phone are automatically received by the California Highway Patrol regardless of whether the call is dialed from the freeway or in city limits.
The practice of routing calls to the CHP has historically been the practice, dating back to when wireless phones were mounted on the console in a car. As a result, the vast majority of calls came from the road, Humphrey said.
As cell phones have become more portable — the newer models even equipped with a global positioning system — the responsibility of answering emergency calls are slowly being transitioned from the CHP to local public safety agencies, Humphrey said.
“There is no appreciable difference between calling (from a cell phone or landline),” he said. “The number one issue is not the technology, it’s the number of call takers available at any given instance.”
For the time being, 911 cell phones calls in Santa Monica will still be automatically routed to the CHP, said Lt. Alex Padilla of the Santa Monica Police Department. City officials are looking to make the switch, and if the decision is made to move forward, the transition could happen anywhere from four to six months from now, Padilla said.
Sunset Park resident Zina Josephs has dialed 911 from her cell phone twice in the past year,the first time when she saw a car accident on the I-10 Freeway between the I-405 Freeway and the Cloverfield Boulevard exit.
She dialed 911 and was placed on hold for approximately five minutes.
“It’s an emergency phone number so you expect to get an immediate response,” Josephs said.
The second occurrence took place a few months ago on the I-10 Freeway near Cloverfield Boulevard, the accident involving a motorcyclist.
Josephs dialed 911 and was repeatedly met with a busy signal, eventually dialing the Santa Monica Police Department’s non-emergency police dispatch number. The dispatcher answered immediately, she said.
If local agencies take emergency 911 cell phone calls made within city limits — not on CHP jurisdiction — it eases the burden for CHP, enabling its dispatchers to answer calls in a quicker fashion, said Thomas Prigatano, 911 coordinator for the CHP’s Los Angeles Communication Center.
Adding to the delay for the CHP are so-called “phantom dial-up,” which occurs when a cell phone starts dialing 911 unknowingly to the owner. The phantom dial-up usually occurs when the cell phone owner accidentally sits on top of a phone left on the car seat.
“It makes sense it should be answered by the city,” Prigatano said of cell phone calls made within city limits.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 6, 2007. Read the original PDF.