A man was found dead in his office 10 hours after calling 911 for help. However, responders were unable to locate him due to a phone glitch that confused his location in the large building. Proper implementation of Enhanced 911 (E911) capabilities would have allowed responders to pinpoint his exact location and potentially save his life.

1. “Man Found Dead in Office 10 Hours After
911 Phone Glitch Confuses Rescuers,”
- Washington Post
Chesapeake Telephone Systems
Planning for ENHANCED 911
Why it’s important and what it means to you
A few seconds can make the difference between life and Common legislated requirements
death. With the need for emergency response always a
possibility in public places and businesses, today’s leaders More states continue to add laws to address E911, providing
direction to businesses that use Multi Line Telephone Systems on
must ensure the security of people who visit and work in
how to provide detailed caller location information to 911. They
their buildings. A well implemented Enhanced 911
typically mandate:
strategy provides the capability to pinpoint the exact
 Ability to route the 911 call directly to a 911 Call Center,
location of a caller in distress, not only to the building
without interception.
where the call originated, but potentially to the cubicle or
area where the call was placed.  Ability of the 911 Call Center to obtain a location identifier
and number that originated the call.
In a high profile building, a woman died from smoke  Ability to respond to a 911 call and dispatch Emergency
inhalation caused by a fire while rescue teams were services to the exact location.
onsite looking for her. They were unable to identify
 Ability to quickly locate the caller within the premises from
her location in the building, but knew she had
which the 911 call originated.
requested emergency services from one of the
multiple floors. Properly implemented E911 would  Ability to initiate and recognize a 911 call within the
have pinpointed her location in the building. This Multi-Line Telephone System.
incident alone drove the State of Illinois to legislate
E911.
What is NENA & what is their role?
If your state hasn’t established a law, it’s a matter of when,
not if. NENA, the National Emergency Number Association, has
issued E911 Model Legislation designed to help states develop
statutes and rules requiring sufficiently precise caller location
information for 911 calls. A companion document was
Call Chesapeake today! developed highlighting location discovery strategies for VoIP
telephones. NENA educates both legislators and phone system
800.787.4848 administrators on the techniques that can be deployed to solve
the E911 issue. These documents are available on NENA's
chesapeaketelephone.com website: http://www.nena.org/mlts-pbx.

2. “Chesapeake has been supporting us for over 20 years.
We’ve been working together for so long that we’re on a
first name basis - dialing home and mobile phones
whenever we need each other. That’s the kind of
relationship we wish we had with all our vendors.”
Pat Conyers, Director of Facilities
Patuxent Publishing Group
Chesapeake Telephone Systems
Planning for ENHANCED 911
Why it’s important and what it means to you
3 Reasons to address E911 Typical E911 Plan Components
1. Legal Responsibility — Depending on where your offices Inventory Tracking — Tracking of all phone appliances from
are located, you may have a mandated legal responsibility to which a 911 call can originate, with definition of exact
provide E911 services behind your phone system. location.
2. Moral Responsibility — It's the right thing to do regardless Detection and Routing — This is the process by which a 911
of what a law says, or does not say. Millions of people spend call is escalated to a 911 Call Center. This process must exist
their days in large corporate buildings or business parks, and for all telephone appliances in the network capable of being
are completely unaware of the E911 challenges their used to reach a 911 Call Center Agent.
administrators have.
Notification and Escalation — This is the process of
3. Liability Exposure — This is where the real cost of not dispatching a 911 call event locally or externally, such as to a
having an E911 implementation can really hurt. If something security team. This can be achieved using wired, wireless, or
should happen, and someone is injured or killed in a facility cell communication.
from an improperly provisioned E911 solution, the liability
911 Call Center Update — Using NENA standards, provide
decision will be left to 12 people on a jury. With common
information updates (e.g., moves, adds, changes) to the 911
technology available today, the remediation cost of a basic
Call Center so that the phone equipment inventory is
E911 solution is easy to justify. If you don’t have it in place,
synchronized to the 911 Call Center database.
will you be able to justify that with a jury?
Reporting and Logs — Exportable reports and log files
representing transactions between phone equipment and 911
Where to go for help Call Center, inventory movement, escalation and dispatch.
Optimizing a phone system with E911 call handling is no small Passive Monitoring — When a 911 call is in progress, the
feat. In fact, it involves addressing potentially hundreds of security team may want to join into the call to get extra
logistical details — and in proper sequence. In IP phone system information on the emergency issue.
environments, maintaining correlated data on telephone
Call Chesapeake today!
appliances becomes complex because, by nature, IP devices can
move around, maintain their extension numbers, and re-home to
their respective integrated communication platforms. Every
organization needs to put E911 on their radar before an 800.787.4848
emergency ends up in the headlines. Chesapeake can help. chesapeaketelephone.com