911 Call Takers Must Be Classified as First Responders, Rosenworcel Says

“Let’s be clear,” Rosenworcel told an APCO lunch Wednesday. “911 operators are first responders. When the unthinkable occurs, they are our first contact with public safety. ... They deserve to be classified like their public safety peers.”

Failing to give them that classification “diminishes the importance of their role in crisis,” Rosenworcel said. One of the act's House sponsors, Rep. Norma Torres, D-Calif., is the only former 911 operator in Congress, Rosenworcel said. The commissioner said she spent time with Torres at the Los Angeles call center where she used to work.

Rosenworcel encouraged APCO members to let the FCC hear concerns about the proposed vertical accuracy standard for indoor wireless calls to 911. She dissented from a March Further NPRM, saying a vertical location accuracy metric, or z-axis, of plus or minus 3 meters for 80 percent of indoor wireless calls to 911 isn’t good enough (see 1903150067). FCC officials said Tuesday work is ongoing on the standard. “A 3-meter policy does not provide public safety with precise floor location,” Rosenworcel said. “When police or firefighters show up in an emergency, the last thing they should have to do is take out a measuring tape. They need to know precisely where you are.”

Rosenworcel warned FCC efforts to establish a national database for carriers and 911 call centers on “who to call and where to go when an outage has occurred” has stalled. “That’s a shame,” she said. “We should set a deadline and get this database up and running without any further delay.”

During a panel Wednesday, officials from public safety answering points spoke of the challenges they face. The PSAP managers said funding is always a big concern and there shouldn’t be some PSAPs that are haves and some that are have-nots. Maureen Will, director-communications at the Newtown, Connecticut, Emergency Communications Center, said her PSAP has two operators a shift: “I can get inundated. … We do everything that you do, but on a smaller scale.” Her state does listen, she said: “When we say, ‘No, I cannot do this, can you help us’ … they listen.”

Baltimore Fire Capt. Scott Brillman, who directs the city's 911, said he has been in emergency services for 23 years, but recently at a PSAP. “For many of those years, I never knew what goes on in a 911 center,” he said. “I had never set foot in a 911 center.” Brillman said how PSAPs work is little understood. “In the field, people have no clue what happens in that room and there’s the problem,” he said. His call center has opened its doors to other first responders, he said. 911 operators make thousands of “critical decisions” a minute, he said. “How many decisions does a fire chief make a day, like five?” he said: “'You’re allowed to wear shorts; now, guys, put out that fire.'” PSAP operators make thousands of decisions “that can change a life,” he said. “They’ve got to be recognized.”

“We do a stressful job,” said Jeremy Hill, co-manager of the Amarillo (Texas) Emergency Communications Center. “It’s hard.” PSAP operators have to make decisions based on very limited information, Hill said. “That happens every fricking day, multiple times per day.”

PSAP operators are “truly the unseen heroes,” said Jason Kern, executive director of Southeast Emergency Communications. “People are calling on their worse day.” Operators go from mundane tasks to “taking that call and giving CPR instructions and waiting the nine or 10 minutes until that person gets transported and then wondering what happens,” he said.

APCO Notebook

Ray Lehr, Baltimore City Fire Department former assistant chief and now a FirstNet consultant, told us the network is further along now than anyone could have predicted. Lehr sees the involvement of AT&T, which won the contract, as key. “We always anticipated that [the contract] was going to be awarded to a contractor and then once they began, they would start building,” he said. “We never envisioned that a carrier would say, ‘We’re ready on day one to give priority access to our network as it exists today.’” Two years after the contract, 65 percent of FirstNet’s 700 MHz spectrum has been deployed, Lehr said. “I’ve done two major radio projects, one for the city of Baltimore, one for the state of Maryland,” he said: “We never were able to make that kind of progress.” Building a network would have taken many years, he said. With 5G launching, “it would have been 7G before they ever got the public safety network up and operational,” Lehr said. Word of mouth is key to selling FirstNet, he said. “Public safety is an old boy network, here’s some old girls out there now, too,” he said: “If you as a police chief or a fire chief are considering a new technology you call up your peers … and they’ll be dead honest.”