B.C.’s 911 emergency call system is about to change significantly with call-takers soon being able to receive medical records, pinpoint a caller’s location, receive texts and receive calls from cars.
The changes are due to be in place by March 2025.
“On the same day, Telus has been ordered to turn off the legacy network,” said Telus policy lead Jeffrey Smith. The new system will be web-based.
Speakers on the issue at the Union of BC Muncipalities’ annual convention in Whistler said the shift to next generation 911 is not without its challenges, including funding and handling privacy concerns with movement of secure and personal data.
Emergency calls in B.C. are routed through the centralized E-Comm hub, which handled two million 911 calls in 2021, said president Oliver Grüter-Andrew. And, he said, the system is seeing a 10 per cent increase in call volume year over year.
He noted 95 per cent of calls are answered within five seconds or less, and that operators are trained to detect the level of distress in a caller’s voice so they can escalate the response to the needed level.
Grüter-Andrew said the system is “creaky” under current volumes with challenges coming from the opioid crisis, COVID-19 calls, heat event issues, forest fires and floods.
Those calls, Grüter-Andrew explained, are then ‘downstreamed’ to the appropriate service provider such as ambulance or fire services.
Even there, though, he said complexities are added in those systems, making response times longer. Add to that emergency responder recruitment staff issues, and problems mount.
For example, Grüter-Andrew said, if an emergency room is experiencing backups, ambulances have to go elsewhere and bottlenecks in the system grow.
Benefits of the changes could include diversity-specific responses, health condition-specific responses and greater sensitivity to rural needs, he said.
Locating callers would be enhanced through the use of geographic information system data.
The new systems could also allow witnesses to crimes to send in photos or videos to help responding police officers. Machines would also be able to connect to the system. That means in the case of car accidents, a technologically advanced vehicle would be able to transmit data about a crash in which it had been involved.
Other issues involve things such as the Rogers system outage in July, which impacted millions of Canadians. Meanwhile, Telus had problems when a beaver downed a tree and cut communications in one area.
Still, explained Smith, telecommunications companies have redundancy systems in case of outages.
Telus is contracted to provide entry to the E-Comm system in B.C. and Alberta and has hundreds of agreements in place or being completed to provide the services.
Another issue of concern, explained Capital Regional District chief administrative officer Bob Lapham, is funding. What’s needed, he said, is a provincial revenue stream.
“We’re talking tens of millions of dollars here,” Grüter-Andrew said.
And then there’s the governance aspect as each of the province’s 25 regional districts is responsible for providing the service.
“Who is responsible for explaining this to British Columbians?” asked Grüter-Andrew. “There is no overarching plan for what we say to British Columbians. It is time for British Columbia to take responsibility and fund the service.”
