STOCKTON — "My mom needs help!"
Susana Tupou was frantic as she raced across the street toward a neighbor mowing his lawn. Moments before, the 16-year-old had discovered her mother face-down on the living room carpet.
Advertisement
In California, a cellphone call to 911 can be hit or miss
A TIMES INVESTIGATION / CALIFORNIA'S VULNERABLE 911
SYSTEM
The neighbor, Antonio Zamora grabbed his cellphone -- the only phone he had -- from his belt clip and punched in 911.
The global positioning system linked to Zamora's phone should have sent information to California Highway Patrol dispatchers, showing his location in a subdivision of two-story homes in the northeast part of the city.
But on this day last fall, the CHP's screen came up blank.
As the minutes ticked by -- with Susana wailing in the background, "What can we do? . . . What can we do?" -- Zamora struggled to make one operator, then another, understand just where the emergency was.
The ordeal bared critical vulnerabilities in California's 911 system. Had Zamora used a land line phone, his address would have popped up automatically on dispatchers' computers. Instead, by using a wireless phone, he was depending on less reliable tracking technology.
Despite technological advances and reform efforts over the last decade, the automated system often fails to determine the location of cellphone callers. A Times review of data for August and September, the only months for which numbers are available, found that more than 1 in 5 911 wireless calls in California -- more than 300,000 in all -- came into CHP dispatch centers with no location information.
Hundreds of thousands of additional calls arrived with limited or imprecise information.
Under federal regulations, dispatch centers in California that accept wireless calls are supposed to receive, at a minimum, the address of the antenna transmitting the call -- a rough indication of the caller's location, officials said. In areas like Susana's neighborhood, served by call centers with advanced technology, a dispatcher should be able in nearly all cases to plot locations within a maximum of 980 feet.
"This is critically important to public safety and critically important to people -- to be able to pick up the phone and have the local police or local fire department find you," said Kevin J. Martin, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
The FCC released an order Tuesday to tighten cellphone tracking standards for 911 calls over the next five years, highlighting national concerns over finding wireless users in emergencies.
Many times, technical glitches don't matter. A caller knows where he is and can convey the location in short order.
In the case of Susana's mother, Katinia Finau, it mattered a great deal.
Without the aid of electronic tracking data, the risk for human error multiplied. When the CHP dispatcher transferred Zamora's call, as is customary, to a local emergency operator, she also passed along a misunderstanding. She referred to Susana's street, Keyser Drive (pronounced Key-zer) as Kaiser. Perhaps complicating matters, Zamora repeated the incorrect pronunciation.
The new dispatcher sent rescuers to Kaiser Road, in a farming area 13 miles from where Susana was waiting.
--
'I'm scared'
Ten minutes after Zamora placed his call, he was standing with Susana, looking down at Finau's body.
At the dispatcher's request, Zamora asked Susana to start CPR and press on her mother's chest.
"Oh, no, I'm scared," she said.
"But that's your mom," Zamora told her.
"I can't do it!" the girl cried.
Even the dispatcher seemed to be growing concerned. She asked Zamora if the firetruck was coming.
"We don't hear the siren," he said.
More than 15 minutes into the call, Susana grew impatient. The girl, who is hearing-impaired, ran up and down the street, knocking on neighbors' doors for help.
Desperate to make the dispatcher understand where they were, Zamora gave the dispatcher major cross streets and landmarks such as an auto mall and two nearby schools. He spelled the street name for her as well.
Still uncertain, the dispatcher told Zamora to find Susana. "Let me talk to her," the dispatcher said.
Zamora raced to the corner to get the girl. Susana returned with Zamora's cellphone and told the dispatcher her address on Keyser Drive.
"I need your house phone number" the dispatcher said.
"My phone is off," the girl responded.
"You don't have a phone number?"
"No," Susana said.
It had been disconnected because the family chose to use cellphones only to avoid the additional cost of a land line. Zamora didn't have a land line either. The home where he was mowing the lawn was an unoccupied house he was preparing to sell.
After an additional barrage of questions about her address, Susana became overwhelmed.
"I don't know. . . . I'm sorry," the girl said.
--
Limited technology
The glitches and gaps in wireless location technology have become more significant as the proportion of 911 calls made with cellphones has soared.
FEATURED
MORE:
Advertisement
