911's deadly flaw: Lack of location data

As water filled her sinking SUV, Shanell Anderson did what anyone would do. She tried the doors. They wouldn't budge. She dialed 911 on her cellphone, telling the operator exactly where she was.

Anderson, 31, was delivering newspapers near Atlanta around 4 a.m. that day in late December, so she knew the cross streets, even the ZIP code. She repeated her location over and over, but it didn't help. Because Anderson's call was routed through the nearest cellphone tower to a neighboring county's 911 system, the dispatcher couldn't find the streets on her maps. Worse yet, the system couldn't get a fix on the cellphone's location before the call ended.

In the agonizing final seconds of the call, Anderson's words are muffled by the sounds of pond water. The dispatcher asks for the address again, then utters, "I lost her."

It took 20 minutes for rescuers to get to Anderson and pull the 31-year old suburban Atlanta woman from her car, barely alive. She died a week and a half later in the hospital. Her 911 call is one of millions that fail to give police, fire and ambulance dispatchers a quick fix on location, a technology shortfall that can leave callers like Anderson in grave danger.

In an era when your mobile phone can tell Facebook, Uber or even video games where you're located – with amazing accuracy – 911 operators are often left in the dark.

Your chance of 911 getting a quick fix on location ranges from as low as 10% to as high as 95%, according to hundreds of pages of local, state and federal documents obtained and reviewed by USA TODAY and more than 40 Gannett newspapers and television stations across the country.

The review of 911 call records, including data for seven large states and many additional cities, shows:

• In California, more than half of cellphone calls didn't transmit location to 911 from 2011 to 2013, and it's getting worse. Last year, about 12.4 million, or 63%, of California's cellphone calls to 911 didn't share location. Among the worst places: Silicon Valley. In December 2012, precise location was shared in 10%-37% of the area's emergency calls, depending on the wireless carrier.
• In Colorado, 58% of the 5.8 million cellphone-to-911 calls last year transmitted coordinates, according to data obtained from the Colorado 911 Resource Center.
• In Texas, two-thirds of cellphone calls in a sample of calls from major cities – including Austin and Houston – reached 911 without an instant fix on location from 2010 through 2013.
• In the Virginia suburbs outside Washington, Fairfax County reported 25% of cellphone calls included precise location data in 2014, and Loudoun County said 29% of mobile calls did over the last six months of 2014.

Those figures are typical of what's documented by 911 officials in hundreds of other communities, according to local, state and federal government records. There is no mandate or standard for collection or study of 911 location data. The FCC doesn't collect data, and neither do some 911 centers. That makes it difficult to look at consistent statistics from state to state.

In their reports and letters to the FCC, police and fire chiefs, 911 operators, emergency room doctors and others raised concerns about the problem worsening as more calls shift to the cellphone network, which accounts for at least 70% of all 911 calls.

"It is now easier than ever for victims to reach 911, but harder than ever for responders to reach them," said David Shoar, the sheriff in St. John's County, Fla., writing to the FCC in November as president of the Florida Sheriffs Association.

The FCC and the four largest cellphone carriers say they're doing their best to address the problem. This month, they worked together on a new federal rule that requires carriers to steadily increase the percentage of cellphone calls to 911 that transmit location data.

The rules, crafted in part by the carriers, call for delivery of location data for 40% of cellphone calls by 2017 and 80% by 2021. In the months spent drafting the rule, the FCC and the companies said a higher success rate is not possible sooner, indicating the current rate is below 40% in many communities.

David Simpson, a retired rear admiral who is chief of the FCC's Public Safety and Homeland Security Bureau, acknowledged the system is not capable of solving the problem sooner. His agency's mission instead was "to ensure there was a backstop of enforceable regulations that held them accountable for improving the indoor location accuracy challenge."

The four largest cellphone carriers declined to answer reporters' questions. Their trade organization, CTIA The Wireless Association, said that, until recently, the cellphone-to-911 location technology being used was meant for outdoor use and simply doesn't work as well indoors.

Scott Bergmann, the group's vice president for regulatory affairs, said the cellphone companies "stepped up" last year to begin an aggressive effort to improve the system using new technologies, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, to increase the availability and the accuracy of location data from cellphone calls.

"That's huge," the FCC's Simpson said. "We have not had that obligation on the carriers before."

Bergmann said, "The FCC's timeframes are aggressive." The companies "are hard at work with our public safety partners to improve wireless 911 calls as quickly as possible."

The delay in finding Shanell Anderson resulted from a combination of lingering problems involving cellphone calls to 911.

First, as her car sank in Cherokee County, Anderson's phone connected through a tower in nearby Fulton County. She was talking to a 911 dispatcher in the wrong town. The call center's computer maps didn't show the streets Anderson kept repeating. It took minutes, and a call to another county, for emergency teams to realize what was happening, delaying firefighters' response.

Most important, 911 never received location data from her cellphone before the line went dead.

"There are times when it doesn't come up at all," said Carl Hall, chief of technology at Alpharetta's Public Safety Department. "Every day we receive calls where we get a (cell) tower address, and that's it."

When rescuers did arrive, they spotted the SUV's still-burning headlights under water. A firefighter dived in and fished Anderson from the car. Medics restarted her heart, but comatose, she never recovered.

"If the phone had automatically routed to the correct jurisdiction, this very well may have had a different outcome," Hall said.

Technical explanations are not good enough for Jacquene Curlee, Shanell's mother, who said it's "insane" that 911 can't locate someone considering the capabilities of smartphones.

"Why is it more important for a 99-cent app or Facebook to know where we are than the 911 operator who answers the call?" Curlee asked. "When you have GPS, when you have apps that have locator services, you're telling me 911 doesn't have the capability to locate someone?"

No, it doesn't, at least not for every cellphone call. Across the country, there are similarly dire cases.

In 2008, Denise Amber Lee was kidnapped in Sarasota County, Fla., and dialed 911 while on the floor of her assailant's car, but the dispatcher could not get a location for her cellphone. Lee was raped and murdered before she could be found.

In 2010, Carol Ouellet called 911 in Cortez, Colo., as her lungs slowly filled with blood. For two minutes, the dispatcher tried to get useful information from her, but the woman could utter only a word or two. The cellphone call didn't include location data. It took the operator two hours to find the woman. By the time police got to her house, Ouellet was dead.

The 911 system was designed for landline telephones, transmitting your call and your location instantly over a hard-wired connection.

Today's cellphone system does not automatically send location data when you dial 911. After the call comes in, the dispatcher's computer transmits a digital request to the cellphone network seeking the phone's location. The data exchange can take seconds or even minutes. Sometimes, it doesn't return a location at all.

The most high-tech 911 centers automate the process, digitally requesting the location every few seconds. If the system can't locate the device, cellphone carriers' systems will use nearby towers to estimate. These methods sometimes do net location information later, although public records show some call centers see major gains as calls go on and others see only marginal improvement. Often, 911 calls end before that digital back-and-forth yields a specific location for emergency responders.

In short, your phone's apps are connected directly to the GPS unit inside the phone. The 911 system relies on getting that information through a relay process, although the FCC's Simpson said the agency wants to work with companies such as Google and Uber that have mastered location services to build a 911 app. The more immediate focus is to make continuous improvements to systems to "close the gap between Americans' expectations of what 911 will do for them and what it can really do."

The quest to make cellphone calls to 911 more useful to emergency crews began in the mid-1990s. The FCC set a deadline: Two-thirds of cellphone calls would transmit location to 911 by 2002. That rule was written when cellphone calls were mostly made outdoors, and the industry says it can meet the goal when applied only to outdoor calls. The deadline got pushed back several times since then.

The proliferation of mobile phones means a problem impacting a tiny share of calls fast became a problem for most calls. In many homes, a cellphone is the only phone. Exponentially more calls are made indoors, creating more interference for networks trying to get a location fix.

Even when 911 does receive a location, it's sometimes wrong. Test calls by Gannett journalists working with 911 centers in the Denver, Washington, Minneapolis and Charlotte areas resulted in calls without location data or with coordinates that were off by hundreds of feet.

Green Bay Police Chief Thomas Molitor wrote FCC Secretary Marlene Dortsch in December lobbying for fast movement on the issue, saying dispatchers and callers face enough stress during a 911 call, but public safety teams can't provide a solution without a location, which they have with less frequency.

"An estimated 10,000 people each year would be saved with accurate location standards from indoor cellphone calls," Molitor wrote, citing an FCC estimate for the number of lives that could be saved by a one-minute reduction in emergency response times. "Whatever hang-ups they have cannot be more important than 10,000 lives."

Contributing: Chris Vanderveen of KUSA in Denver, Russ Ptacek and Erin Van der Bellen of WUSA in Washington, Steve Eckert of KARE in Minneapolis, Phillip Kish of WXIA in Atlanta, Thom Jensen of KXTV in Sacramento, Mike Deeson of WTSP in Tampa, Michelle Boudin of WCNC in Charlotte.