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For people who may be lost in the woods, driving on the highway, or are in other situations where they don’t know their location offhand, technology can help. Josh Cole is a dispatch supervisor at Lucas County 911. He says dispatchers always like to confirm the address of an emergency with the caller, but it isn’t the only way Lucas County 911 can find where people are calling from.

“If we did have a caller that wasn’t able to talk to us or didn’t know exactly where they were at, generally we have a lot of tools to figure out where they’re at,” Cole said. As soon as someone calls 9-1-1, Cole said the first tool to come through is Wireless Phase 2. This gives dispatchers a latitude and longitude of the call. “In this case, it looks like they’re at the Walmart in Oregon,” Cole said, pointing to a real call a dispatcher was taking. Wireless Phase 2 instantly narrows down the area to a few houses on a street.

“You might have to correct a number or something, like maybe they’re in the 3700 block of Navarre instead of the 3600 block of Navarre,” Cole said. Another tool, Rapid SOS, gets an even more accurate location in seconds. “It’s one of our favorite tools,” Cole said. “Even before we consolidated.”

Lucas County 911 was created in 2021, combining all dispatch centers in the county into one service. Cole said the technology they use is the same as it was pre-consolidation, including Rapid SOS. The program creates a map of the people calling Lucas County 911 and pins their location, even if they are moving.

“On the highway, you don’t necessarily if you’re going east, west, north, south sometimes you get confused,” Cole said. “Well, you can see the little pin dots and you can see them northbound, 75, like ‘you sure you’re not going northbound to Michigan?’ … You can see the history of them hitting each time it refreshes.”

Dispatchers can also see past addresses you’ve called from before to see where you might be calling from. “And then if worse comes to worse and those three fail, I can always ping the phone too with the cellphone provider if it’s a life or death emergency,” Cole said.

Cole said they don’t rely only on the data, and they always double-check with the caller.