911 RESPONSE SLOWER FOR CELL-PHONE USERS CITY COUNCILMAN CALLS FOR AN L.A. SOLUTION.

Byline: Orith Goldberg Staff Writer

For years, emergency-aid dispatchers have been frustrated by the difficulty of locating cellular phone users who call 911 - and the increased response time because of how such calls are received and routed.

The proliferation of cellular phones - and the fact more than 30 percent of all 911 calls now come from them - has got telecommunications companies and legislators scrambling for a solution.

But the wheels of the federal government aren't spinning fast enough for Los Angeles.

``When it comes to public safety, we can't (wait) in Los Angeles for the federal government to act,'' Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss said. ``We need to make this issue a local priority and not hope the federal government will have a magic wand. ...''

Motivated by these facts and his own frustration in dialing 911 from the freeway, Weiss has launched a campaign to study how the 911 cellular system can be improved in Los Angeles. He is looking for ways to cut delays, to offer a seven-digit emergency number exclusive to the city and to identify technology that can track a caller's location better.

The councilman's concerns were underscored Feb. 14 in Palmdale when 24-year-old Jacquelyn Ruiz of Burbank overturned her car at 1:30 a.m. and dialed 911. She was dazed and did not know where she was.

It took emergency crews about an hour - and a dispatcher listening to train whistles and the sounds of emergency-vehicle sirens through a headset - to find her in the area of Avenue M and 4th Street East in Palmdale. Fortunately for Ruiz, she had suffered only minor injuries.

Sonya Carius, a spokeswoman for the National Emergency Number Association based in Columbus, Ohio, said 911 call dispatchers are up against these types of frustration every day. And not all cases turn out as well as Ruiz's.

``(Dispatchers) are supposed to figure out what county to transfer you to, and that takes time,'' Carius said. ``... When you find out you lost a caller, that's pretty catastrophic. We can speculate that (for) the families of people not found in time ... it's an extremely tragic time.''

Weiss' proposal comes at a time when all U.S. cellular carriers are under orders from the Federal Communications Commission to make it possible for police to pinpoint 911 cell-phone calls. The FCC expects 95 percent of the cell phones sold in the United States by 2005 will meet its guidelines.

But even with that technology, there still comes the added delay of transferring cell-phone calls to local agencies and the possibility that a caller will have to repeat his or her description of the emergency, adding precious minutes to the response time.

``What I'd like to see implemented is a system (so) if someone dials 911 on a cell phone in the city of L.A., most of the time that call will go to a 911 operator with the authority to dispatch help rather than going through an intermediary,'' Weiss said.

Weiss took his cue from San Francisco, which also didn't want to wait for federal regulations to improve its emergency dispatch system. The city is in the first phase of a project to make it possible for 911 calls made more that a half-mile from an interstate highway to be answered by local 911 police operators instead of the California Highway Patrol.

The city also publishes a 7-digit emergency number to be used as an alternative to 911 from mobile phones. The next phase of the project will include the ability to geographically locate a mobile phone caller.

In California, the highway patrol is the primary agency that answers 911 calls by cellular phone users - and 6.5 million calls were received in 2000. According to Paul Rogers, a CHP communications supervisor, these calls can get a bit complicated.

In Los Angeles County all calls are routed through the CHP's Los Angeles Communications Center, where a caller will hear a prerecorded message asking what is being reported. When the caller begins to speak, the dispatcher asks the caller for a name, phone number and location.

If all goes well, the call is transferred to a local 911 dispatch center within 36 seconds. But that's not always the case.

If the caller does not know his location, the dispatcher will ask the caller to describe landmarks or signage. If the caller is unable to speak, but can hear what's going on, the dispatcher will yell into the phone to get the caller's attention.

If that doesn't work, the dispatchers activate caller ID and identify the cellular carrier, which can provide a billing address so they can try to contact someone there who may know where the caller was headed.

In 2001, the Los Angeles communications center answered 1.7 million cellular 911 calls, said Jan Rhodes, a CHP communications supervisor. During January 2002, the center answered 91,256 calls, Rhodes said.

About 60 percent of all cellular 911 calls in Los Angeles County are mistakes, Rhodes said.