Dialing for Help on Cell Phone Is a Crapshoot

Beth Laski was on her way to see a friend last month when she came upon a serious accident in Beverly Hills and dialed 911 on her cell phone.

Jose Torres of West Los Angeles had lost control of his car and slammed into a tree on a median. But Laski couldn’t get an answer at 911, and she wasn’t the only one.

“There were three of us at the scene, all calling 911 on cell phones, and no one could get through,” says Laski, who watched desperately, talking to the man as he slowly expired. The phone rang, and rang, and rang. It rang for a full three minutes before she turned off the phone.

There’s no way to know whether the delay made a difference. But Torres, 63, died before the ambulance arrived, according to his daughter.

Three weeks later, the very friend Laski was on her way to meet had a nearly identical experience. Anita Busch witnessed a serious accident on the San Diego Freeway near the Santa Monica Freeway and dialed 911.

It rang about 25 times before she hung up and dialed again, only to have it ring 15 more times without a pickup. So she called her sister and told her to try.

Busch doesn’t know the outcome of the accident, but she and Laski shared notes and were horrified by what they learned about the 911 system. Especially given the new landscape of potential horrors since Sept. 11.

“I called the CHP and talked to a supervisor,” Busch says. “He said, ‘I know. It’s really bad.’ ” He told Busch that he gave his wife and loved ones another number to call in case of an emergency.

“That’s great for your wife and your family,” Busch told him. “But what about the rest of us?”

The rest of us can say a prayer and hope for the best.

Dialing for help from a cell phone is something of a crapshoot, thanks to A) greed and sloth among wireless carriers, B) the wonders of bureaucracy, and C) legions of dimwits who dial 911 for everything from weather reports to bus schedules.

“We get questions like, ‘Are the trains running on time?’ ” says California Highway Patrol Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick. “We get them asking where the store is, the restaurant, whatever, and we’re very quick and abrupt with them.”

Being abrupt isn’t enough. A good caning is closer to the mark, if you ask me. What kind of moron dials 911 for directions to a restaurant?

When you dial 911 from a cell phone in California, the call goes to the CHP, which is sometimes overwhelmed. The number of calls has rocketed from 29,000 in 1985 to 6.5 million in 2000, thanks to the explosion of cell phones and the aforementioned dimwits.

In September, two-thirds of the cellular 911 calls were answered in less than a minute, according to the CHP. But 21% took between one and two minutes. That’s an eternity in an emergency.

Two percent of September’s 911 calls rang for three minutes or longer. You’d be better off with carrier pigeons.

With an average of nearly 18,000 calls daily, that’s 360 calls at three minutes or more. And don’t forget, that’s not the response time. That’s the time it takes for them to pick up the phone, find out where you are and send help.

Spike Helmick admits to problems, but claims it’s not as bad as it sounds. If you can’t get through to report an accident you’ve just witnessed, it might be because 50 other people dialed in ahead of you to make the same report, he says.

In a case like that, calls will actually be blocked, says Carl Hilliard of the Wireless Consumers Alliance.

Beautiful. Some nut could be coming at you with a machete, and 911 doesn’t pick up because the system assumes you’re calling to report an accident.

Half the problem could be avoided by tomorrow if there was more money for the CHP to hire additional operators and buy more equipment.

If all of this has you worked into a lather, I advise skipping the rest of the column because it gets worse.

There’s a partial solution out there. Location-detection technology, or E-911, would instantly identify a cell phone caller’s location, same as if you called from a land line.

But wireless carriers thumbed their noses at an Oct. 1 deadline for getting it into place, and the toothless wonders at the Federal Communications Commission gave them an extension.

Travis Larson, a lobbyist for wireless carriers, says they’re still tackling the E-911 technology and won’t be ready to begin using it until the middle of next year. It’ll be 2005, he said, before the service is available everywhere.

2005?

We could probably learn how to bounce our voices off the moon before 2005. What is this guy talking about?

“It’s the same old story,” says Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Atherton), who’s been after these people for five years. “You have to put your money where your mouth is, and in many cases, wireless companies weren’t even close to being prepared for the Oct. 1 deadlines.”

Eshoo says she got interested because of several cases in which E-911 could have saved lives. She wants penalties imposed for wireless companies that don’t immediately pick up the pace, and she promises:

“I’m going to be on them like white on rice.”

In the meantime, as Beth Laski and Anita Busch found out, your best bet may be to marry a CHP officer.

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Columns by Steve Lopez appear Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached at steve.lopez@latimes.com.