Some police officers are able to work full careers without ever having to unholster their service weapons on a call, says Derrick Walker, director with the 911 dispatch center in Durango. But not one day goes by that any of them could have done their jobs without their radios.

And to improve on that all-important tool in law enforcement, the Durango-La Plata County Emergency Communications Center recently integrated a new 911 call-tracking system called RapidSOS.

The system, which Walker called the biggest breakthrough for the 911 industry in 50 years, will cut down response times because of its ability to precisely track the location of 911 calls made from cellular devices – something the legacy landline emergency call system was never designed to do, he said.

The RapidSOS system went live on March 9. For the emergency communications center, where just 11 dispatchers are stationed, it couldn’t come soon enough.

911 calls in the county increased 15% in 2021 from 2020, a rate Walker said is unheard of.

“Last year was busy,” he said. “Our staff worked hard. Real hard.”

Why so many more calls than in previous years? COVID-19 may have played a part last year, Walker said, but the main cause is likely the result of a population increase.

The RapidSOS technology is a game changer for emergency communications. Unlike the legacy 911 system, it is able to pull location data straight from mobile devices that are placing emergency calls as long as location tracking is enabled on the devices.

“When cellular technology came along, that’s kind of where the national network falls a little short at times,'' Walker said.

With the legacy 911 system, emergency dispatchers must wait for a triangulation process to locate where a cellphone call is coming from, he said. But amid the foothills of the San Juan and La Plata mountains, there’s no guarantee three cellular towers are going to be able to complete the process.

Even when the triangulation process is successful, the call location received by emergency dispatchers leaves room for doubt – about 400 meters of uncertainty, or the equivalence of a city block, according to the 911 dispatch director.

Last year, the communications center had a call about hikers lost near Purgatory Resort. The center had to send helicopters with a search party to track the lost hikers even though they were able to triangulate their broad location.

“We knew the general area, but when you get 100s of meters of uncertainty in a national forest, it gets pretty big quickly,” Walker said. “So this (RapidSOS) would give us the exact location of that caller.”

With RapidSOS, the communications center will receive a caller’s precise location with an accuracy of 15 feet or less. Precision isn’t the only benefit – once a call is made, location data will be fed to dispatch so quickly that the location will be recorded before the dispatch phones ring, Walker said.

RapidSOS can also track location if a caller is in motion, another feature the new technology boasts over the legacy 911 system.

The ability to identify location so precisely isn’t useful in just wildland settings – it can help cut down response times in urban environments, too.

Walker said RapidSOS can help officers or emergency responders determine if a caller is inside a home or in the backyard, which could eliminate precious seconds that would have been spent searching spaces adjacent to a distressed caller’s true location.

“For the folks that are concerned about Big Brother, (the data) is completely unavailable to the 911 center unless someone makes that call,” Walker said. “So you have to make that call before we have any ability to see that location information.”

Durango-La Plata County Emergency Communications Center is looking into even more potentially lifesaving features to implement into the RapidSOS system.

People with medical histories that would inform emergency responders how to proceed in case of an emergency can register themselves with RapidSOS.

“Let’s say they are diabetic, have high blood pressure, they are able to go in and register themselves with this company,” Walker said.

If a person chooses to register parts of their medical history with RapidSOS, dispatchers and emergency responders will receive that information, helping them respond to calls with the right tools for the job.

RapidSOS is also capable of integrating with commercial home alarm systems, although the communications center isn’t using that feature at this time.

“We haven’t turned this on yet, but at some point, we’ll probably have access,” Walker said. “The system will call the alarm company, but on our map screen we’re going to see it and already know there’s an alarm before they contact us.”

The alarm company would still have to feed the communications center information about the triggered alarm, but dispatch will automatically have the location of the alarm.

Walker said the communications center will continue to build on the RapidSOS system.

The communications center is also building up its staff. The center is searching for new and experienced dispatchers and 911 shift supervisors. A new operations manager is starting Monday. She has about 30 years of dispatch experience, Walker said. Overall, the center is looking to fill nine positions.

Walker said the new RapidSOS system was implemented at no cost to taxpayers or the communications center because the developer of RapidSOS relies on other revenue streams.

cburney@durangoherald.com