"Hurry!" coughed one little boy. "Hurry! Get us out!"
"We're suffocating!" the other cried, his voice echoing from beneath the boulder that has entrapped them.
Through coughs and pleas for aid, one of the two boys managed to utter one of the funniest lines ever written into a kids' movie, if you're sharp enough to pick it up:
"Somebody call IX-I-I!"
This moment from Disney's 1997 film Hercules has always been one of my favorite moments. For anyone who doesn't get it, the boy is pleading for some bystander to dial IX-I-I, which is how one might represent 9-1-1 in Roman numerals.
The reference is further anachronized by the fact that, despite using the titular hero's Roman name (Hercules was, by many accounts, a Romanized take on the Greek Heracles), it is well-established that the movie takes place in Greece. Roman numerals wouldn't be invented until the ninth century B.C.E., whereas the hero Heracles would have been assumed to live closer to 1280 B.C.E., a few decades prior to the start of the Trojan War-- three hundred years prior to the advent of Roman numerals.
However inconsistent with historical and mythological timelines, the detail is, nevertheless, still amusing. Of course, to the layperson (especially one who didn't spend their junior high years poring over the Percy Jackson series, and who certainly wouldn't have read The Iliad well before high school), the joke is as forgettable as it is quick.
Most people my age grew up being taught that, in case of emergency, you dial 9-1-1. I can't remember a time I didn't know that. Even if my parents hadn't taught me, my kindergarten would have, when the fire department did yearly visits to the local elementary schools to teach kids how to do that funky little dance we call stop, drop, and roll.
So it's probably a bit mind-boggling for anyone under the age of thirty to realize that "Call 9-1-1" wouldn't be the accompanying lyrics to the You're On Fire: Now What? choreography. Today, about 96% of the United States is covered by 9-1-1, with much of the "dead space" belonging to areas where cell service is not a guarantee anyway.
But 9-1-1 has only been around for about fifty years. In fact, my town still has the old copper lines in operation today, their upkeep likely due to the not-insubstantial population of mostly older folks who still use them to dial the Police and Fire Departments directly.
In the "old days," to report a fire, you'd call your town's local FD directly. To request police response to a scene, you'd call the PD. The first "dispatchers" were often just whatever officers happened to be in the station. There were also no standards by which these officers would be obligated to respond to every reported emergency.
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| This lack of response standards is how you get fiascos like the one depicted in one of my favorite campy horror movies, Killer Klowns from Outer Space (1988) |
Before 9-1-1, if you were in need of medical transport, you would have called a hospital. (If the hospital could spare you an ambulance, it wouldn't have been staffed by medical professionals, either. The advent and development of EMS as we now know it was a result of the spread of large highways, as the increasing rate of speed in modern vehicles and the danger of their occasional collisions became more and more prevalent-- but that's a topic for another day.)
The need for these numbers to be consolidated was first pointed out in 1957 at the National Association of Fire Chiefs, where the idea for designating one standardized number at which fires could be reported. A decade later, in 1967, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice convened and decided that the Fire Chiefs were right.
It was at the suggestion of AT&T to the FCC that the numerals 9-1-1 were chosen, as they were easy both to remember and to dial, and had not yet been assigned either as an area code or a direct line to anywhere.
Up until then, all phone numbers had been seven digits, and the telephone infrastructure was not equipped to take or dial out a 3-digit one. So the structures in place that facilitated telephone communications had to be fixed up in order to process 9-1-1 calls and route them to emergency response agencies, later dubbed "PSAPs". This was a lengthy process, but Congress had backed AT&T's proposal with a series of legislative acts carried out over the next few decades.
The first 9-1-1 call was made on February 16th, 1968 by Rankin Fite, Speaker of the Alabama House of Representatives. However, it wasn't yet a standardized practice. Just because Haleyville, Alabama incorporated 9-1-1, soon to be followed by the State of Alaska and some scattered other places, didn't mean the rest of the country automatically did, too.
Furthermore, by the time that call volume necessitated designated call-takers, such individuals were not equipped the way we are today. My training enables me to virtually triage a mass casualty event, give life-sustaining medical intervention instructions, and analyze (and hopefully diffuse) a variety of dangerous situations. But the idea of EMD wasn't introduced until after 1978, when the Salt Lake Fire/EMS determined that dispatchers could play a far more vital role in saving lives if only they were trained in pre-arrival intervention.
In 1973, the White House's Office of Telecommunications issued a declaration encouraging mass adoption of the program. In the next three years, 9-1-1 was adopted by just under a fifth of the country. By the 80s, it was up to a quarter, with nine states fully covered, and by 1987, about half the country recognized 9-1-1.
Just as the century was about to turn, Congress passed the Wireless Communications and Public Safety Act of 1999, which amended the Communications Act of 1934 (the same bill that created the FCC). The amendment did several things, including officially establishing 9-1-1 as a nationwide emergency number, allowing cell phone carriers to release location information with PSAPs, and requiring that both listed and unlisted phones be able to access 9-1-1, whether they were contracted for phone service or not.
As the 20th Century came to a close, over 90% of the United States had 9-1-1 coverage, and 95% of that was what we call "Enhanced 9-1-1." This refers to the location service that cellular callers mean when they respond to my inquiries about their location by asking me that frustrating question: "Don't you have, like, a map or something?"
(For the record, yes. I have a map. No, I do not wish to gamble your safety, no matter how annoying you are, on the odds that my maps are always correct. Remember, kiddos: 911: Lone Ranger is not a higher authority than my training.)
It's not just the scope of 9-1-1 that has been developing since its inception, however: the quality of 9-1-1 care has been a constant source of legislative motions as well.
In 2013, in a quiet hotel room in Texas, a man broke into the room of Kari Hunt Dunn and her daughter. While Kari recognized the man as her estranged husband and likely pleaded with him to not hurt her, Kari's daughter was trying to call for help. Though only nine years old, she knew to dial 9-1-1 in emergencies-- but unfortunately, the hotel's landline service required its users to dial "9" before making external calls.
To a generation raised with cell phones, the idea of needing to "dial out" is unthinkable, so of course the little girl didn't know why none of her four calls went answered. All she knew is that she'd been told her whole life that, no matter what happened, if she dialed 9-1-1, someone would come to help, and now, nobody was coming.
For five years, Kari's father Hank Hunt fought to make sure nothing like this would ever happen again. Finally, on February 16, 2018, "Kari's Law" was passed federally, requiring all phone service companies to ensure that 9-1-1 would be accessible on all serviceable phones, without the need to dial out.
Along with Kari's law, you also have RAY BAUM’S Act, which highlights the importance of exact location services and encourages PSAPs to use whatever tools and technology are available to obtain as precise a location as possible. There's also Alyssa's Law, named for a victim of the Parkland school shooting, that requires schools to have silent panic alarms linked directly to emergency response services, and has been passed in many states.
It's hard to reconcile the good these laws do with the names we give them: each one a reminder of the people we've failed to save, the disasters we couldn't prevent, the deaths we couldn't stop. But each call I take, I learn a bit more, and I get a little bit better at my job. And with each tragedy that we as emergency responders fail to prevent, we refine our craft a little bit more.
Seeing how 9-1-1 has developed in this time is one way to mark our progress. We've come a long way, after all, from the days of IX-I-I.
For works cited, see here.
