E911 is worth the fee
Fayette County residents have the opportunity on Tuesday, Nov. 4, to provide for the addition of Enhanced 911 emergency phone service. We hope that they take advantage of that opportunity.
County residents are being asked to approve the addition of a $2.75 monthly surcharge to the bills for their landline phones. That’s $33 a year for a lifesaving service that is equaled by no other.
In case you don’t already know, Enhanced 911 service is vastly different than the basic 911 service that we now have. You also may not know that those of us with cell phones are already paying an E911 surcharge for those phones; it’s just that those funds will not come to this county until we give our approval to add the service.
With basic 911, calls made from landline phones go to the Fayette County Sheriff’s Office, and calls made with cellular phones go to the Illinois State Police District 12 headquarters in Effingham (or to another ISP dispatcher much further away, if the District 12 line is tied up).
Whether you’re making a 911 call from a landline phone or cell phone, you have to provide the police and fire dispatcher with ALL of the necessary information, including the type of emergency, the site of the emergency and directions to that location.
With Enhanced 911, information necessary to get the proper emergency response agency to the proper location – and much, much more – appears on the dispatcher’s computer screen as soon as the call is received.
In addition to that basic information about the caller, the E911 screen will also tell the dispatcher the appropriate police agency, fire department and ambulance service to send to the emergency. Also on the screen is any pertinent medical information about the caller and his family, as well as information about the caller’s property, such as the presence of hazardous materials.
It will take some time to get the system operational, because of the need to gather information from residents and establish an address system for rural areas, but the final product will be well worth the wait.
How well is the emergency phone system accepted statewide? We’re one of only 14 counties in Illinois, out of 102, that do not have E911 service; four counties are in the process of implementing the service.
With emergencies, seconds and minutes count. Those seconds and minutes can mean life or death in many cases. And just about everyone who is part of an emergency response team in Fayette County can tell you stories about how a flustered or seriously ill caller provided incomplete or incorrect information, which deprived the caller of those critical seconds and minutes.
It’s because of all that Enhanced 911 can provide in emergencies that we continue to support its passage.
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