Sort of, a voice call is ALWAYS treated as valid and real. It must be. What an EPIRB does in those situations is give an extra data point on location. Without a voice call the EPIRB is also treated as valid, however the level of suspicion that it is a false alarm is extremely high, as most activations are in fact accidental.
Thing is, a few voice calls a year are outright false alarms (many are debatable as far as being a true "emergency", but those people do in fact believe they are in emergency situations.) But in the EPIRB realm things are reversed, the vast majority are outright false alarms, with only a few legitimate emergencies. It's easy to accidentally press a button on an EPIRB, some are also set up to automatically activate if immersed in water (which can happen accidentally due to poor maintenance) or when turned upside down (easily done when maintaining the unit) and many simply have mechanical failures that activate them. It's much harder to accidentally hold the microphone button down and repeat the word "mayday"
Don't forget that we're talking about a situation where the emergency services person specifically told the caller that they didn't believe that it was a real call. This changes a LOT about your scenario.
No, you're missing the point. I'm not denying that false alarms are a real problem, they absolutely are. I'm simply explaining that filtering can not be the solution to that problem.
You don't solve false alarms by guessing at which ones are legit and ignoring the rest. You solve false alarms through enforcement and deterrence. Used correctly, this technology is a great enforcement tool, and regular enforcement leads to deterrence.
If we truly believed that we'd disband the fire department, the police force, the coast guard, and any health care that still remained in your country.
Do you want it to be your life that's lost on that one call?
Emergency services need to treat ALL calls as real until proven otherwise. This is however a great tool to be used in investigative work after the fact to find, arrest, and charge the perpetrators of any pranks. The goal should be to decrease the prank calls through enforcement, not to ignore calls that might be pranks.
I've used DF equipment, and it's not as perfect as you make it sound. Sure it will give you a bearing, but there's only so much precision to it, and it won't give you distance, only direction.
It's a small help, but not really enough to locate a prankster. Especially the most common kind, the ones who like to watch their prank unfold, and who are therefore by necessity somewhere relatively close to where they claim to be.
Surely they can determine the call's position within a few miles?
Most pranksters aren't content with calling in a prank and then forgetting about it, they want to see the responders arrive at the scene. As such, most of the people probably are within a few miles of the location being described, usually on land and reporting something to be just off the coast. How accurate was your DF equipment again?
Depends on the area. Not every jurisdiction uses the same resources for enforcement and rescue activities. I know the US coast guard does both, but the Canadian Coast Guard for instance has no enforcement role, that's left to the Canadian Border Services Agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and local police forces.
Enhanced 911 service, by law, activates the GPS in your phone and relays it to the emergency dispatch centre. This is only done if you dial 911, and triggered by the phone, not the carrier (so they can't reach in and remotely activate your GPS without your permission)
This is necessary because there are many situations (especially in rural locations) where only a single tower can see your phone, and therefore can not triangulate your location. Even if you can see multiple towers, reflections from buildings, absorption by different materials, etc, mean that a triangulated fix is generally fairly low accuracy (usually a few hundred metres at best) whereas a GPS position (if it can get one) is usually accurate to withing a couple of metres.
You may want to review how 911 service actually works.
Which is why this is a better investigative tool after the fact, than it is filter before the fact.
The best part about this is the ability to uniquely identify and profile callers so that you can build a better profile of a criminal serial prankster, this will help better track them down so that they can be arrested and charged.
Rescue costs are a bit tough to calculate. Official numbers for each rescue are astronomically high, but they usually don't account for the fact that many of those costs would have existed with, or without, the rescue. For example, the crew needs to get paid, and that doesn't change if they are sitting at base waiting, or actually on a rescue. planes and boats cost money to operate, but often if they weren't operating on an actual rescue, they would have been operating on a training exercise instead. That said, it's possible there was no training scheduled that day, or that more resources were called in than you'd normally have on stand-by, or that crews went in to overtime, etc, etc. There are also many volunteer groups that don't get paid, unless on an actual rescue in which case they get honorariums or per diems. All in all it gets quite complicated, and it isn't helped by the fact that for each of the groups involved it's in their own best interest to quote as high a number as they can justify.
An individual SAR is often quoted in the hundreds of thousands to a million dollar range, but it's hard to say what the real incremental cost is. Using those numbers though, "millions" could easily happen with only a small handful of calls, so I'd say based on normal SAR accounting, "up to" should probably be replaced by "many"
EPIRB is great, but it's slow compared to a voice call, doesn't transmit what the emergency is, and doesn't allow for any confirmation that help is on the way, or allow rescuers to communicate with you. I've done SAR response for EPIRBs, they work, but a voice call will always get you help faster.
Should the person living on a boat pay for the fire department to be available for your house? As a society we've decided to work together so that everyone shoulders the burden equally. They pay for you just as much as you pay for them.
Depends on the situation. EPIRB is great, but it is not as instant as a voice call, in fact there can be significant delays in getting the location and dispatching resources, and it does not allow for any description of what the emergency is, or for you to receive either acknowledgement that help is on the way, or instructions on how to help yourself in the meantime or to help prepare for their arrival.
I have been part of SAR responses for EPIRBs, they work, but they're more of a last resort option than a first choice if you're in actual trouble. (though by all means, if you are experiencing a real life threatening emergency, don't chose one option, choose ALL options available to you)
Thing is, this isn't even talking about stupid boaters (of which I have witnessed far too many!). It's talking about outright pranks, where even the person making the call doesn't believe there is any reason to do so. Generally this is some person sitting comfortably at home but claiming to be in a boat taking on water or some such.
Their large network is designed for increased coverage, not for direction finding. As such, a large percentage of calls only reach a single tower, not the multiple towers required for easy direction finding. Vessels use other tricks, but they require active work with specialized gear to do the location, something not practical with a single land based repeater tower.
I don't think you understand what counts as a "positive" in a system detecting prank events. "positive" would be a prank, a "false positive" would be a real call that was labelled by the system as a prank.
I am not saying that prank calls should not be dealt with, only that this is not the appropriate way of doing so.
That said, I might be in favour of using such a thing as part of a triage tool, for example if you have N resources available, but N+1 calls that come in, this could be used as a small part of the algorithm that decides which calls get the resources first. But if you have N resources, and no more than N calls, I can't advocate ignoring the call based on this technology.
Having made the mistake at one point of sailing on a long weekend off of Victoria BC, I fully agree. However we aren't even talking about those people in this article. The article is talking about people sitting in their living room and pretending to be on a sinking ship. These calls have no value at all. However I really think the best course of action for those calls is to use investigative techniques to track down the caller, and then fine them enough to cover the response, the investigation, and all other related costs.
As for training. The coast guard is fully capable of arranging their own training as needed, and the types of responses they do for unnecessary calls actually detracts from, rather than contributes to that training.
Slashdot Mirror
Sort of, a voice call is ALWAYS treated as valid and real. It must be. What an EPIRB does in those situations is give an extra data point on location.
Without a voice call the EPIRB is also treated as valid, however the level of suspicion that it is a false alarm is extremely high, as most activations are in fact accidental.
Thing is, a few voice calls a year are outright false alarms (many are debatable as far as being a true "emergency", but those people do in fact believe they are in emergency situations.) But in the EPIRB realm things are reversed, the vast majority are outright false alarms, with only a few legitimate emergencies. It's easy to accidentally press a button on an EPIRB, some are also set up to automatically activate if immersed in water (which can happen accidentally due to poor maintenance) or when turned upside down (easily done when maintaining the unit) and many simply have mechanical failures that activate them. It's much harder to accidentally hold the microphone button down and repeat the word "mayday"
Don't forget that we're talking about a situation where the emergency services person specifically told the caller that they didn't believe that it was a real call. This changes a LOT about your scenario.
90% of what emergency services respond to is "saving people from themselves"
The American banks have been ignoring that market for decades, they still seem to be doing all right.
No, you're missing the point. I'm not denying that false alarms are a real problem, they absolutely are. I'm simply explaining that filtering can not be the solution to that problem.
You don't solve false alarms by guessing at which ones are legit and ignoring the rest. You solve false alarms through enforcement and deterrence. Used correctly, this technology is a great enforcement tool, and regular enforcement leads to deterrence.
You don't think people who have boats pay taxes?
Statistically they pay more taxes on average than those who do not.
The solution to misuse of emergency services is never to disband that service. the solution is to find the pranksters and deal with them.
I think you missed my entire second paragraph.
If we truly believed that we'd disband the fire department, the police force, the coast guard, and any health care that still remained in your country.
As a society we've decided to move beyond that.
Do you want it to be your life that's lost on that one call?
Emergency services need to treat ALL calls as real until proven otherwise. This is however a great tool to be used in investigative work after the fact to find, arrest, and charge the perpetrators of any pranks. The goal should be to decrease the prank calls through enforcement, not to ignore calls that might be pranks.
I've used DF equipment, and it's not as perfect as you make it sound.
Sure it will give you a bearing, but there's only so much precision to it, and it won't give you distance, only direction.
It's a small help, but not really enough to locate a prankster. Especially the most common kind, the ones who like to watch their prank unfold, and who are therefore by necessity somewhere relatively close to where they claim to be.
Surely they can determine the call's position within a few miles?
Most pranksters aren't content with calling in a prank and then forgetting about it, they want to see the responders arrive at the scene. As such, most of the people probably are within a few miles of the location being described, usually on land and reporting something to be just off the coast. How accurate was your DF equipment again?
Depends on the area. Not every jurisdiction uses the same resources for enforcement and rescue activities. I know the US coast guard does both, but the Canadian Coast Guard for instance has no enforcement role, that's left to the Canadian Border Services Agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and local police forces.
Enhanced 911 service, by law, activates the GPS in your phone and relays it to the emergency dispatch centre. This is only done if you dial 911, and triggered by the phone, not the carrier (so they can't reach in and remotely activate your GPS without your permission)
This is necessary because there are many situations (especially in rural locations) where only a single tower can see your phone, and therefore can not triangulate your location. Even if you can see multiple towers, reflections from buildings, absorption by different materials, etc, mean that a triangulated fix is generally fairly low accuracy (usually a few hundred metres at best) whereas a GPS position (if it can get one) is usually accurate to withing a couple of metres.
You may want to review how 911 service actually works.
Which is why this is a better investigative tool after the fact, than it is filter before the fact.
The best part about this is the ability to uniquely identify and profile callers so that you can build a better profile of a criminal serial prankster, this will help better track them down so that they can be arrested and charged.
Rescue costs are a bit tough to calculate. Official numbers for each rescue are astronomically high, but they usually don't account for the fact that many of those costs would have existed with, or without, the rescue.
For example, the crew needs to get paid, and that doesn't change if they are sitting at base waiting, or actually on a rescue. planes and boats cost money to operate, but often if they weren't operating on an actual rescue, they would have been operating on a training exercise instead.
That said, it's possible there was no training scheduled that day, or that more resources were called in than you'd normally have on stand-by, or that crews went in to overtime, etc, etc.
There are also many volunteer groups that don't get paid, unless on an actual rescue in which case they get honorariums or per diems. All in all it gets quite complicated, and it isn't helped by the fact that for each of the groups involved it's in their own best interest to quote as high a number as they can justify.
An individual SAR is often quoted in the hundreds of thousands to a million dollar range, but it's hard to say what the real incremental cost is. Using those numbers though, "millions" could easily happen with only a small handful of calls, so I'd say based on normal SAR accounting, "up to" should probably be replaced by "many"
EPIRB is great, but it's slow compared to a voice call, doesn't transmit what the emergency is, and doesn't allow for any confirmation that help is on the way, or allow rescuers to communicate with you.
I've done SAR response for EPIRBs, they work, but a voice call will always get you help faster.
Should the person living on a boat pay for the fire department to be available for your house?
As a society we've decided to work together so that everyone shoulders the burden equally. They pay for you just as much as you pay for them.
Depends on the situation. EPIRB is great, but it is not as instant as a voice call, in fact there can be significant delays in getting the location and dispatching resources, and it does not allow for any description of what the emergency is, or for you to receive either acknowledgement that help is on the way, or instructions on how to help yourself in the meantime or to help prepare for their arrival.
I have been part of SAR responses for EPIRBs, they work, but they're more of a last resort option than a first choice if you're in actual trouble. (though by all means, if you are experiencing a real life threatening emergency, don't chose one option, choose ALL options available to you)
Thing is, this isn't even talking about stupid boaters (of which I have witnessed far too many!). It's talking about outright pranks, where even the person making the call doesn't believe there is any reason to do so. Generally this is some person sitting comfortably at home but claiming to be in a boat taking on water or some such.
Unfortunately it's been shown that it also causes some people in real distress to hang up.
It's much better for use in post prank investigation and followup.
Their large network is designed for increased coverage, not for direction finding. As such, a large percentage of calls only reach a single tower, not the multiple towers required for easy direction finding.
Vessels use other tricks, but they require active work with specialized gear to do the location, something not practical with a single land based repeater tower.
Only in a few backwards countries.
I don't think you understand what counts as a "positive" in a system detecting prank events. "positive" would be a prank, a "false positive" would be a real call that was labelled by the system as a prank.
I am not saying that prank calls should not be dealt with, only that this is not the appropriate way of doing so.
That said, I might be in favour of using such a thing as part of a triage tool, for example if you have N resources available, but N+1 calls that come in, this could be used as a small part of the algorithm that decides which calls get the resources first. But if you have N resources, and no more than N calls, I can't advocate ignoring the call based on this technology.
Having made the mistake at one point of sailing on a long weekend off of Victoria BC, I fully agree. However we aren't even talking about those people in this article. The article is talking about people sitting in their living room and pretending to be on a sinking ship. These calls have no value at all. However I really think the best course of action for those calls is to use investigative techniques to track down the caller, and then fine them enough to cover the response, the investigation, and all other related costs.
As for training. The coast guard is fully capable of arranging their own training as needed, and the types of responses they do for unnecessary calls actually detracts from, rather than contributes to that training.