By Meg Peters
Review Staff Writer
Although it wasn’t officially announced until just a week ago, some Orion Township residents have been texting 911, and it was working.
On January 26 the Oakland County Sheriff’s Department officially made text-to-911 available to cell phones with data texting plans, giving Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile customers another option to communicate in an emergency.
‘We weren’t even telling people we were doing this and they tried it and it worked,? Mel Maier said, chief of emergency management operations for the Oakland County Sheriff’s Office.
While it is still best to call in a crisis, if that option is unavailable texting is now a secure, alternate option.
‘There are times when a person can’t make a voice call to 911,? he said.?’Maybe they are witnesses to crimes or a victim of the crime and can’t use the standard voice feature for safety reasons.?
Or for the hearing impaired and speech impaired community, which are growing in text users, this service will be immediately beneficial, he said,?
Just type 911 into the ‘to? field of the text message and texters will receive a response from a live dispatcher almost instantly. All 911 text messages will be automatically routed to the Oakland County Sheriff’s office in Pontiac, which will then notify local police departments where the emergency is occurring within seconds of the text.
The first response back will be, ‘what is your location??
The most important thing, also the trickiest part, Maier said, is pinpointing the exact location of the emergency, especially from cell phone callers.
Last year 84 percent of more than 500,000 911 callers used cell phones rather than land lines, but cellular data coverage does not give an exact location.
‘If a text-to-911 caller tells us right up front ‘this is where I am at? it’s going to help us get someone to them quicker,? Maier said.
The second most important thing is informing the dispatcher what the emergency is. A description is needed to notify OCSD on what response teams to send.
Lastly, the dispatcher will ask, ‘may we call you??
‘Our dispatches are trained to listen to background noises to hear cues and clues of what’s happening at the location. When they talk to callers they hear it in their voice, if they are upset, angry or even lucid,? Maier said. ‘We lose that with texts.?
If the texter cannot speak a dispatcher will remain live, texting throughout the emergency, he assured. Also, if for some reason the text message does not go through’if the phone does not have service or if the caller steps out of Oakland County’the texter will receive a bounce-back message informing that the service is not available.
The county adopted the slogan, ‘call if you can, text if you can’t? in partnership with the National Emergency Number Association to promote text-to-911 for emergencies only. The county will receive oodles of information on each texter, including the caller’s carrier, phone number, name and billing address.
The OCSD requests that no texting shortcuts be used, such as ‘idk? which in text talk means ‘I don’t know.? Dispatchers will do the same and text entire words out.
Oakland County dispatchers made about 300 test calls in all corners of the county over the past three weeks to ensure the service’which was free to implement in the county’worked everywhere.
‘It’s the single largest text-to-911 system deployed in the state,? Maier said.
Maier, along with other local representatives, is traveling to the capital later this month to inform the U.S. House of Representatives of the service’s success, and to speak about other new generation technology.
Text-to-911 is only an interim solution.
By 2017, the county will have a new emergency services internet protocol (IP) network, or ESI NET, which will allow local emergency units’such as the Lake Orion Police Department’to receive the 911 texts directly. Other next-gen technology headed the county’s will allow pictures and videos to be sent directly to the 911 computer dispatch system.
The current text-to-911 system only receives Short Message Service (SMS) messages.
All non-emergency comments, questions and suggestions for the new text-to-911 service can be directed to?248-858-4911.