Missoula 9-1-1 will soon know your location

Missoula’s 9-1-1 dispatch center staff will soon know where a call is coming from before asking for an address.

By DANA ATTOCKNIE of the Missoulian

On Wednesday, the county approved a bid to purchase enhanced 9-1-1 equipment that will display a caller’s address on phone sets as a call comes into the center.

The enhanced equipment will come from Billings-based Industrial Communications and will cost $245,675. "Quarter Money," the tax on each phone bill for 9-1-1 services, will be used to purchase the equipment.

Installing the enhanced equipment is half of the upgrade, and updating the address database is the other.

"We have to have the accuracy of the master street addressing guide up to 95 percent," said Jane Ellis, director of emergency services for Missoula County. "We have to compare all the addresses that the county has with all the addresses the phone company has."

Addresses will be reconciled with both the Qwest and Blackfoot telephone companies. Ellis said most of the corrections will be matching "South" to "S." or "Avenue" to "Ave." Yet, having an accurate address can be vital especially in instances where a person is in a panic or intoxicated.

"Sometimes it can be very difficult to get the address out of someone," Ellis said.

She said a caller once said he was on the east side of town when he was actually on the west side, so responders were delayed in getting to the scene.

"Depending on the circumstances, having the address given to us automatically can make a 10- to 15-minute difference in response time," Ellis said.

Currently, 13 out of 56 counties in Montana have enhanced 9-1-1 programs for land lines, Ellis said. The next step may be to produce the same enhanced service for wireless callers.

"Some folks only have cell phones," Ellis said. "It takes a little bit more equipment and a little more software to be able to recognize what that phone is sending. We have quite a bit more work to do with wireless carriers. I don’t believe it exists anywhere in Montana."

It will take approximately 45 days for the equipment to arrive and an additional month to have it installed, she said. The ongoing equipment maintenance will be $5,000 a year.

Ellis said the 9-1-1 call center in Missoula takes approximately 80,000 calls a year.

http://missoulian.com/articles/2003/08/08/news/local/news05.txt