Emergency wireless

Cell phones are a convenience that nearly every American relies on to streamline their lives and make instantaneous communication possible for both work and pleasure. \nYou can change the location of a class project meeting from the Herman B Wells Library to Soma in an instant. Your mom can ease her mind by checking on you 15 times while you’re navigating the freeways home for a weekend visit. Does the erratic Indiana weather drop a freak rainstorm on you right as you intend to stumble home from the bars? No problem, just call a cab. \nMany people, including much of the editorial board, decided that the practicality of exclusively having a cell phone is far more economical than maintaining a land line. For the state of Indiana, however, this common luxury could end up costing your life.\nWhen an emergency call comes from a land line, the current technology can trace the location of a call within seconds, saving vital rescue time. With cell-phone calls, however, it is significantly more complicated to pinpoint the location of the emergency. And though all cell phones produced after 2004 are implanted with a GPS tracking device, the majority of Indiana emergency response locations are not equipped with the technology to trace these GPS devices. Having to use guesswork to figure out the location of a victim costs vital time in the lifesaving process. To add insult to this injury, the loss of revenue for 911 service resulting from so many people canceling their land-line services, which come with a mandatory 911 fee, is also preventing emergency response teams to be able to update the technology in order to trace the location of 911 calls via GPS.\nThis simply won’t do. The switch from land lines to cell phones is the natural evolution of technology, and the government must adapt to continue to serve its taxpayers. It’s the responsibility of our state to ensure that the most vital of services, emergency response, is cared for and technologically cutting edge in order to save lives.\nIt’s a given that when a greater amount of the financial pie is allocated to one public service, other programs lose funding elsewhere. We feel, however, that in this situation, a financial loss to another sector would be worth it. Is there any service more important than emergency response? We certainly can’t think of any. \nThe state must allocate more funds to our emergency response teams. Updating the technology to track cell phones makes more sense than making people choose between a cell phone and a land line, because accidents often happen out of the way of land-line access. It would be absolutely unconscionable if a single person died because the government was too cheap to buy GPS emergency response tracking. The technology exists, and if the government has enough funds to track us via GPS for Homeland Security purposes, it can certainly afford it for emergency response to save our lives.