Pa. county to install cell phone tracking system
Cell phones can be located precisely in a third of Pennsylvania; in Ohio, it's 4 percent.
PITTSBURGH (AP) -- You pass an accident on a lonely stretch of highway at night. You call 911 on your cell phone to report it but don't know exactly where you are.
Soon that won't be a problem in Cambria County, where emergency officials said they plan to install technology allowing county 911 dispatchers to track where emergency calls are placed. The city of Allentown and nine counties have such technology, but other counties do not -- placing the state well behind the rest of the country in emergency response capabilities.
About one-third of Pennsylvania residents live in areas capable of locating 911 cell phone callers precisely, according to recent data from the National Emergency Number Association.
Only Mississippi, Montana, Oklahoma, Utah, Hawaii and Ohio fared worse. In Oklahoma, only about 1 percent of state residents are covered; in Ohio, the figure is only about 4 percent.
"Compared to national statistics, the state is certainly lagging behind," said Patrick Halley, governmental affairs director at the National Emergency Number Association.
Almost a dozen states -- including neighboring Maryland and Delaware -- and the District of Columbia are completely covered by 911 cell phone tracking technology, which uses information from GPS chips embedded in some cell phones or by monitoring how far the caller is from nearby cell phone towers. A March report by the Government Accountability Office documents similar results.
Progress
But Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency spokesman Patrick Fleming said that the state was well within its own timetable for implementing the 911 cell tracking technology.
"Governor Rendell made this an absolute priority," Fleming said. "During the Rendell administration, the wheels have been in motion on this at a very brisk pace."
Pennsylvania funds its 911 cell tracking technology with a $1 surcharge on wireless phone service, Fleming said. The state began collecting funds in July 2004 and has received about $120 million since then, he said.
He said the state should be covered by 911 cell tracking technology in three to five years.
About 50 million 911 calls -- roughly a third of all emergency calls, and double the figure from 1995 -- are made from mobile phones, according to a recent Federal Communications Commission report.
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