Monte McClain

Considering the recent outage of 9-1-1, I thought it might be good for the residents of Park County to get a little more information regarding how 9-1-1 works and the complexities in keeping this outdated system functioning in its current state. This will be a long post to ensure you, as a caller, know what happens if you call 9-1-1 and Park County’s history with it.

In 1957, the National Association of Fire Chiefs recommended the use of a single number nationwide for reporting fires. Depending on where you lived in the U.S., you might have four different phone numbers that you needed to call whether you needed police, fire, EMS or other assistance. In 1967 the President’s Commission of Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice recommended that a single number be established nationwide for reporting emergencies. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) met with the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) to find a means to make this happen. AT&T announced in January of 1968 that they had chosen the number of 9-1-1 as it didn’t match any area codes across the U.S. and was easy to remember. In February of 1968 they made the first 9-1-1 call in Alabama. 

Fast forward eight years to 1976 and 9-1-1 became possible in Wyoming. The 9-1-1 service back then used the physical address of your landline phone to route the call, along with your prefix, to the Public Safety Answering Point (called a PSAP) responsible for services in your area. This spread slowly across the state as the phone companies made the necessary changes to their phone switching equipment, allowing 9-1-1 to be recognized. A Selective Router was installed in Cheyenne to assist in routing these 9-1-1 calls across the state. This antiquated technology uses copper phone trunks called Centralized Automatic Message Accounting (CAMA) trunks to send the call where it needed to go. The government allowed the phone company to bill for the lines and to charge mileage for the distance between Cheyenne and the local 9-1-1 agencies, making Park County 9-1-1 trunks some of the most expensive to pay for as we are the furthest from Cheyenne. We currently have eight 9-1-1 CAMA trunks providing 9-1-1 coverage in Park County divided between the Park County Sheriff’s Office and the Powell Police Department. These are fixed path lines and they cannot be rerouted easily or quickly when a line is cut or damaged. All 9-1-1 calls in Park County come in on those eight lines from Cheyenne. If you have ever called 9-1-1 you will notice that there is about an eight to 10 second delay before it even starts ringing. This is because your call is sent to Cheyenne to the Selective Router which then checks the number to try to obtain a physical address. In the event of a cellular 9-1-1 call, it queries the cellphone for its Global Positioning System (GPS) location so we can see on our mapping software where the caller is located. Since we have millions of cellphone-carrying-tourists who visit Yellowstone every year, this has become crucial to obtain.

Once the information is gathered, it’s sent from the Selective Router back to Cody where it rings a special computer-based phone that can receive the very limited information provided and display the location on our map.  

The path to 9-1-1 services in Park County was slow. The costs to provide 9-1-1 services were expensive and just like any other business, we saw expenses increase from vendors statewide.  In 1988 work started with the Wyoming Legislature on the Emergency Telephone Service Act which counties asked and pushed for because of the funding problems. It was passed and enacted in 1989 allowing us to collect up to 75 cents per phone line to help offset this ever-increasing cost. However, we still had struggles at the local level. We requested funding for an Enhanced 9-1-1 (E9-1-1) system in 1989 and the commissioners at the time denied it as too costly. They felt a dedicated number to call locally was good enough. We brought up the Emergency Telephone Service Act and they denied it as well.

Fast forward to 1995 and we had new commissioners who asked why we didn’t have E9-1-1 services, they assumed we had always had it! Our Communications Supervisor at the time proposed using this surcharge fund to pay for the implementation of E9-1-1 for Park County residents. It was discussed and debated with public hearings and meetings between communities on how it would work. This took years. Funding for 9-1-1 started being collected at a rate of 50 cents per phone line in 1997 here in Park County, which allowed us to fund 9-1-1 going forward. Remember that cellphones were just becoming readily available as an affordable solution for mobile calling. 

I started with the Park County Sheriff’s Office in 2000. At that time if you called 9-1-1 from a cellphone, the sheriff’s office would get the phone number you were calling from and that was it. There were numerous technological issues that we had to overcome with addressing. Like building a Master Streets and Address Guide and getting accurate mapping data that would assist us in dispatching the resources the caller needed quickly and accurately. I was assigned to assist with this in 2003 and there was no real training available at the time. I spent a lot of Saturdays and evenings at the library reading and learning how to implement it. The Powell Library most likely hated to see me walk through the door as I was continually asking for them to order numerous books in for use in educating me on how to do it.

As technology improved, it became possible to receive GPS locations based on a chip that was built into cellphones where the coordinates were then sent with the call. Since we here at the sheriff’s office believe in being fiscally conservative, we worked hard to make it happen within our means, a process that continues to this day. Unfortunately, due to inflation the costs continued to rise and in 2019 the commissioners were asked by us to increase the surcharge to the maximum allowable amount of 75 cents per phone line to keep up with costs, which they did. We were one of the very last counties in Wyoming to increase this amount to keep things running. That surcharge on your phone bill that you pay goes to 9-1-1 operations only and is used on a very specific list of items as required by Wyoming Statute.  To this day, we don’t spend beyond our means and devote years to saving up funds before purchasing necessary equipment upgrades to maintain our operations.

It took until 2011 for Park County to obtain what we call Phase II capabilities, focusing on cellphones and the ability to locate callers, due to expenses, complexities, and ever-changing needs with the computer databases that we maintain to make it all work. Technology since then has grown exponentially with advents in computer networks such as broadband internet, IP based data transmissions, and phone systems that can send calls over fiber optic networks.

We work hard to build redundancy into our operations here. The Powell Police Department is our backup in the event we have a failure in Cody. They have identical equipment, and communications officers can walk into their center and seamlessly continue operations from Powell and vice versa. It works great! 

The issue that happened this week was something that all of our pre-planning couldn’t overcome. Due to the outdated phone setup that 9-1-1 uses in Wyoming, a single fiber optic bundle being cut prevented 9-1-1 calls from being routed to Park and Big Horn counties. There is only one route for the calls to travel on, and it is game over when a break in the circuit happens. That fiber bundle also carried traffic for cellphone providers like Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, TCT West, Lumen, and many others. That is why it caused a failure of both our 9-1-1 lines as well as our administrative lines. Having to run a 9-1-1 center on a cellphone should never happen but that’s how we operated until TCT was able to get its lines rerouted. Our preplanning allows us to route calls to neighboring agencies as needed during outages like this.

We started with having Big Horn County handle 9-1-1 calls for us until their lines went down. We then routed our traffic to Washakie County along with the 9-1-1 traffic from Big Horn County. At that point, one communications officer in Worland was covering 9-1-1 calls from three counties! She would take the call, gather basic information in case the call was lost, and then transfer the call back to us in Cody or Powell. The dispatch community in Wyoming is small, and I personally know the great majority of people who do this work across the state. Rest assured, I will be buying both Basin and Worland dispatch staff a thank you meal (at my own expense) for their work in keeping us safe here in Park County.

We are working at the State level with the Legislature to obtain funding to upgrade to what we call Next Generation 9-1-1 or NG9-1-1 which would move these important call systems to a broadband or IP network. The benefits of this would allow us to use a broadband-based network that can automatically reroute the traffic around a break in a line to ensure uninterrupted communications. We could transfer calls across state lines, which the current technology doesn’t allow. We could receive text messages, pictures, and even video from callers giving first responders the best information available to them while responding. Information is key and the sooner we can implement this technology the better it will be for the residents of Wyoming.

I apologize for the length of this and would encourage anyone who has more questions or concerns to reach out to me at the Park County Sheriff’s office. My phone number is 307-527-8716 and my email address is Monte.McClain@parkcountysheriff-wy.gov. 

If you have made it this far, thank you for taking the time to learn about 9-1-1 in Park County.

(Monte McClain is the communications supervisor/9-1-1 manager for Park County.)