NG9-1-1 provides dynamic call routing and cross-jurisdictional collaboration during major disasters, even when local call centers are overwhelmed or completely destroyed.
-Michael Fowler
Hurricane Helene struck the southeastern U.S. in late September 2024, causing widespread devastation across multiple states, including Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. In just a few hours, thousands of people were killed or cut off from rescue as large areas of the countryside became inaccessible and uninhabitable.
With sustained winds of 150 mph, Helene had unleashed torrential rain, storm surges, and severe flooding over vast regions. The storm toppled trees, washed away roads, destroyed homes, and destroyed critical infrastructure, leaving millions of people in communities from Georgia to Virginia without access to power, potable water, and even shelter.
Local EMS services were not immune to the storm’s ravages. Those local Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs)—the emergency call centers that receive 9-1-1 calls from surrounding communities—that were still operational after the storm’s onslaught were soon overwhelmed with pleas for assistance, and many soon became mission-ineffective, unable to dispatch and track local emergency responses reliably.
Fortunately, the state and local emergency-services organizations in most of the affected regions had already adopted “Next Generation 9-1-1” (NG9-1-1) technology: a robust, IP-based emergency-communication structure that enabled them to reroute calls to unaffected areas, bypassing disabled PSAPs and ensuring continued contact with critical state and local services even in the most hard-hit areas.
By allowing calls to be automatically redirected to non-local PSAPs, NG9-1-1 ensures that emergency communications continue uninterrupted, even when local systems are overloaded or incapacitated. Combined with enterprise-level call handling and Computer-Aided Dispatch (CAD) technology, NG9-1-1 removes the need for 911 dispatchers to be physically located in the disaster area, as they can effectively manage emergency calls and dispatch services remotely, ensuring a more resilient and responsive emergency-response system.
Hurricane Helene tested the resiliency of North Carolina’s NG9-1-1 system, in particular. Seventeen PSAPs in western North Carolina lost the ability to receive incoming communications, but the system was able to reroute the calls and get them efficiently answered. Without the state’s previous deployment of NG9-1-1, the situation could have been even more dire than it turned out to be.
“We had a truck driver who was stuck in floodwaters in North Carolina,” related North Carolina CIO Jim Weaver. “[He] called his wife, who was in Arkansas. She called Arkansas 911, they [contacted] our N-MAC [Network Monitoring and Assistance Center], and we were able to get that trucker rescued. So, this stuff does work, and we’re very proud of that fact.”
NG9-1-1 represents a significant, potentially life-saving technological development over “E911,” the previous emergency-services calling system, most critically in its ability to dynamically route emergency calls to non-local Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) using “Emergency Services IP Network “(ESInet) technology. This development ensures that calls get answered even during natural disasters or societal disorder, when local PSAPs can physically be rendered non-functional or become overwhelmed by the high volume of calls.
The response to Hurricane Helene dramatically demonstrated the utility of the dynamic call-routing capabilities of NG9-1-1 and ESInet, allowing incoming communications to be redirected to non-local Public Safety Answering Points (PSAPs) during the storm and its aftermath.
Dynamic Call Routing: The Key Advantage
Limitations of the Previous E911 Systems
E911, the prior approach to EMS communications, relies heavily on fixed, local infrastructure. Calls are routed to geographically determined PSAPs based on the caller’s location. If the local PSAP is overloaded or unavailable due to technical failures or natural disasters, it can lead to delayed or unanswered calls. The call-overflow mechanisms used in E911, such as transferring calls to nearby jurisdictions, are often manual, time-consuming, and inefficient.
The Call-Routing Flexibility of NG9-1-1 and ESInet
By contrast, NG9-1-1’s ESInet is an IP-based, high-bandwidth network that supports multimedia (voice, text-to-911, video, etc.) and enables dynamic call routing. ESInet allows emergency calls to be directed based on a series of real-time conditions—such as the status and operational capacity of PSAPs—rather than purely on the caller’s geographic location. This means:
Load balancing and overflow management: In cases where one PSAP is overwhelmed due to a high volume of calls (e.g., during a regional disaster), calls can be routed dynamically to alternative PSAPs outside the immediate area—even in another city or state—ensuring they are answered promptly.
PSAP redundancy and disaster recovery: In scenarios where a local PSAP becomes unavailable due to infrastructure damage (e.g., hurricane flooding), NG9-1-1’s ESInet allows calls to be seamlessly routed to other PSAPs that are still operational, even if they are located far from the incident.
A Much-Needed Upgrade to Disaster-Response Capability
Helene was the latest example of the life-saving value of implementing NG91-1-1/ESInet emergency communications. But it was hardly the first time the system’s superiority to earlier approaches had been clearly demonstrated. Other recent disasters provide abundant evidence that NG91-1-1/ESInet technology made—or could have made—a crucial difference at the most critical of moments.
Hurricane Sandy (2012)
NG9-1-1 had not been fully deployed when Hurricane Sandy roared across the East Coast, and the damage the storm caused drove home the need for more robust and resilient 9-1-1 systems. During the hurricane, several PSAPs on the East Coast were knocked offline due to flooding, power outages, and damaged infrastructure. Had NG9-1-1 been fully implemented, calls from affected areas could have been routed to operational PSAPs in other states, reducing delays in emergency response. As it was, local resources were overwhelmed, and the consequences ultimately took several years to overcome.
California Wildfires (2017-2020)
Over the past decade, the size and ferocity of California’s annual “wildfire season” has brought the need for more resilient statewide emergency-response systems to the forefront of public discourse. In regions affected by wildfires, traditional E911 systems were overwhelmed by the sheer volume of calls, a problem made immeasurably worse by infrastructure damage as cell towers burst into flame and telephone lines crashed across smoke-blackened highways.
The 2018 inferno in Paradise, California, was one of the deadliest and most destructive in California history. As local PSAPs quickly fell victim to the firestorm and ceased functioning, 85 people burned to death in their homes or suffocated in their vehicles, trapped in endless lines of motionless traffic.
A local firefighter recalled the challenges he faced during the Paradise rescue operations: “There were entire neighborhoods we couldn’t get to right away, and people’s 911 calls were getting dropped. Some people couldn’t get through at all. NG9-1-1 would’ve made a huge difference because even if our local lines were down, their calls could’ve been routed to someone else, and we could’ve gotten help faster.”
In other words, had NG9-1-1 with ESInet already been fully operational at the time of the conflagration, 911 calls from Paradise would have rerouted to unaffected PSAPs across California or even in other states. The real-time adaptability of ESInet would have channeled calls to functioning PSAPs without local infrastructure dependencies, and responders—up to and including firefighting aircraft and smoke jumpers—from across the region might have been more effectively deployed using shared CAD systems.
Hurricane Michael (2018)
When Category 5 Hurricane Michael slammed into Florida, local PSAPs struggled with the influx of 9-1-1 calls amidst widespread power outages and infrastructure damage; these local systems were physically unable to quickly reroute the deluge of incoming calls.
Regardless of the nature of the disaster—hurricanes, wildfires, tornadoes, even severe winter storms—the communications advantages and subsequent flexibility-of-response offered by NG9-1-1 and ESInet are undeniable and often prove decisive to rescue and recovery operations.
These systems:
Facilitate the management of high levels of call traffic,
Reinforce and support access to emergency services in areas that have sustained high levels of physical-infrastructure damage, and
Improve the coordination of computer-aided resource dispatch under the worst conditions.
NG9-1-1’s dynamic call routing, enabled by ESInet technology, significantly enhances the resilience of emergency response systems by ensuring that 911 calls can be answered by non-local PSAPs during disasters or call overloads. The real-world examples of regional disasters described above effectively end the argument over the criticality of NG9-1-1/ ESInet implementation to ensure faster, more reliable emergency responses during future crisis events.
Comments