FOCUS: TECHNOLOGY
Cell phone calls to 911 may go awry
With her garage afire from explosion, Angola mother finds Achilles’ heel in emergency system that’s geared to land lines
Last Thursday, Kelly Anne Scanlon was getting her two young sons ready for bed when she heard a loud boom and felt her house shake.
The Angola resident ran outside to find that her garage was on fire, its windows had shattered and its door had blown out in an explosion, so she dashed back in to get her boys while dialing 911 on her cell phone.
The dispatcher had no idea where Scanlon was and transferred her to a sheriff’s office that hadn’t heard of Angola.
The Lake Erie Beach fire chief showed up minutes later and put out the small blaze with a fire extinguisher, but only because Scanlon’s neighbor reached 911 from a land line.
“I’m so upset. They literally didn’t know where I was,” Scanlon told The Buffalo News.
Scanlon’s difficulty in getting help highlights a wrinkle in the emergency-response network here and nationally.
It’s hard for 911 centers to determine the precise location of a call made from a cell phone, emergency officials said.
Erie County’s 911 center, for example, frequently picks up cell phone calls from adjoining counties — even from Southern Ontario, on occasion.
“It happens. We’ve gotten calls from Fort Erie. It’s not perfect, so that can happen, and it’s a little scary that something in an emergency can get so off track,” said Paul J. Gajewski, deputy director of law enforcement communications at Erie County Central Police Services.
Many people such as Scanlon, who is 36 and works at West Seneca Developmental Center, drop land-line service and rely exclusively on a cell phone.
Last Thursday night, Scanlon put a load in the dryer, in the garage of her North Lane home, then went in to put sons Aidan North, 10, and Lucas North, 8, to bed. “I heard an explosion, and the whole house rocked back and forth,” she said.
After running outside to see what had happened, Scanlon ran back in to wake her children and called 911.
The operator asked what state Scanlon was in, she said.
“I gave them my street address. They asked where that was. I said, ‘Western New York,’ ” Scanlon said.
She was transferred to a sheriff’s office, but the dispatcher there didn’t recognize Angola.
Scanlon was panicking by this point because Aidan was outside with her but Lucas wasn’t.
“I don’t have time to answer a million questions,” Scanlon said she told the dispatcher.
She finally said she was in Evans, in Erie County, and the dispatcher promised to contact the local fire department.
By then, as Scanlon was running back into the house to get Lucas, Lake Erie Beach Fire Chief Guy J. Canonico Jr. was coming up her driveway.
Canonico came so quickly because Scanlon’s neighbor had called 911 from a land line.
The chief, who was leaving a meeting at the Lake Erie Beach fire hall, saw the report of the fire on his pager, grabbed a fire extinguisher and drove to North Lane in his official SUV.
He got into the garage through a side door and found the back wall on fire.
Canonico put out the blaze before firefighters from Lake Erie Beach and backup companies arrived, even saving two pet rabbits in the garage.
“I can only imagine what they were thinking,” Canonico said.
Gajewski, who oversees the Erie County 911 center, checked call records and didn’t find any from Scanlon’s cell phone.
He did find a record of a call from her neighbor at 9:57 p. m. last Thursday reporting the fire.
It’s possible, Gajewski said, that Scanlon’s phone call was routed to a 911 dispatcher in Canada or elsewhere. “Once you move over to Voice Over [Internet protocol] or cell phone technology, you add a little more plus or minus to the equation,” he said. “It’s made it . . . more challenging to find folks.”
About two-thirds of the approximately 600,000 calls that came to the Erie County 911 center last year were made from cell phones, Gajewski said.
Emergency cell phone calls typically are picked up and routed to the 911 center in the county from which the call originated.
The 911 operator asks where the caller is, while the network traces the call to the closest transmission tower.
Frequently, the operator can take a second step — rebidding — that can trace the call to within 20 or 30 meters.
This can’t always be done, and the accuracy of the rebidding depends in part on the service provider and the type of phone used, Gajewski said.
If someone has phone service over the Internet or a cable connection, 911 centers can trace the call as long as the user has registered the phone number to a specific address, Gajewski said.
For Scanlon, this experience is enough to prompt her to reconnect her land-line phone service. She also may consider cleaning the lint out of her dryer.
There’s a second point to be taken away from last Thursday’s fire: The blaze began in Scanlon’s dryer, making it at least the sixth dryer fire in Erie and Niagara counties since February.
“Ninety percent of the problem is not cleaning out your lint trap,” Erie County Fire Coordinator James M. McCullough said.
Scanlon was told that the fire started in the dryer and ignited a gas “ball” that formed under a pile of clothes, causing the blast.
The garage’s windows and door served as an outlet for the gas and heat.
Dryer fires can spread quickly because they burn up clothing and other materials left near the dryer, McCullough said.
Fires Tuesday at West Seneca East High School, May 25 at the Left Bank restaurant, April 2 at the Saigon Bangkok restaurant and Feb. 21 at Mercy Hospital all were linked to dryers, fire investigators said.
McCullough urged people to clean out the lint trap and the door to their dryers, to make sure the area around the dryer is free of flammable materials and to stay home while the dryer is running.
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