By Aaron Crespo
The Oklahoman
OKLAHOMA CITY — Dispatchers in Oklahoma County can find out where a 911 call is coming from even if the caller doesn’t know. The same is true in Logan, Cleveland, Payne, Canadian and several other counties across the state.
Twenty-eight counties in the state have both enhanced landline service and Phase 2 Wireless, which locates callers when they dial 911.
“A 911 call comes in, it provides a latitude and longitude, and in our case here in the Oklahoma City metro, it plots it on a map in front of the call-taker,” said Steve Willoughby, 911 director for the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments. “In essence, what it does is it translates that from a latitude and longitude to a physical street address.”
Counties locate the caller through GPS chips embedded in phones or through triangulation from cell phone towers.
The ability to locate a caller can vary from county to county, Willoughby said. Some counties lack the tools to immediately locate both landline and cell phone callers. Fifteen counties have no enhanced service for landline or wireless service, he said.
“What you have to realize also is that not everywhere in Oklahoma do they even have (enhanced) land-line 911,” Willoughby said.
Adair County is upgrading an addressing system so dispatchers can match an address with a landline call, said Cindy Jones, the county’s 911 coordinator.
Adair county already has that ability in some areas. The county also has a method for locating cell phone callers, she said, but the information derived from cell phone towers narrows the caller’s location to a five-mile radius.
Several counties in Oklahoma still lack a rural addressing system and cell phone location capability.
Major County jailer Nick Holdeman said a rural addressing system is still a few years away and the county cannot get a fix on 911 calls. They depend on caller information, he said, or “we just get all our deputies out there and we find them.”
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