That used to be a problem, but by now cell phones are just as useful in emergency scenarios.
The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're saying it correlates with risky behavior.
The CDC isn't saying that only having a cell phone is itself risky. They're saying it correlates with risky behavior.
It is much less of a problem then it used to be, but cell phones haven't reached 100% parity with landlines.
Consider:
1. Cell phones require reception. At my house, cell reception is universally awful for all providers. I may not be able to even make a call to 911 on a cell phone and, if I do, I am not sure I can trust the reliability of e911. Work arounds include in-home Wi-Fi and femtocells, but...
2. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage (or in the case of my daughter, even a five minute one), I can't gaurantee there will even be a working cell phone on the premises. Wi-Fi won't work, and the femtocell won't work, either.
3. Cell phones get misplaced. In an emergency will I even remember where in the house I set it down?
That's not to say that cell phones don't also offer many advantages in an emergency. They do. Cell phones are usually available and usually close to a person. They can be turned on and hidden but still allow 911 operators to hear what is going on. There is usually about one cell phone per person, etc., etc.
But, at my house at least, I can't completely forgo a landline (although I have at other locations in the past).
This is definitely a valid concern if it applies to you. My mother, for example, would never give up her landline because the reception at her house is definitely inferior to her landline.
I, on the other hand, have consistently excellent reception. I think in general people who have good reception are the ones going land-line only.
> 2. Cell phones require power.
These days, so do many landlines (especially handheld/wireless ones). I could keep my phone charged for 48 hours of normal usage (backup batteries) and far longer if I went into power saving mode.
> 3. Cell phones get misplaced.
A cell phone is always on my person, whereas I would have to hunt down where the landline is.
I guess there are tradeoffs to both, so I'm not comfortable saying you must have only one or the other.
Its one of the defining social/cultural separations of our generation. Even inside families, my wife is a member of your camp and her phone is never out of her physical possession, ever, it even charges next to her in bed, whereas I'm in the other camp and I move my phone from charger to charger and only physically carry it when I'm going out for awhile or if I'm expecting a call.
It has the virtue that in any group of people, there will always be at least one with the ankle bracelet ready for use in one second, even if the battery is nearly dead, and at least one with a fully charged phone a couple minutes away on its charger. So as a group you can get both instant response AND a full day of battery life.
In my experience in a ice storm with long lasting effects, the days when all landlines were adequately powered from a central office are long gone. Your local box's smallish battery will run out no longer than a day or two (others in this discussion say 12 hours), at which time you're better off having a cell phone, which you can arrange to power in a variety of ways. And I'm appalled that after my mother switched to U-verse DSL, her home telecom is now powered through a UPS supplied by AT&T.
If you take no preparations, though, you're better off with a landline. If you're paranoid like me and my family, you have both, I pay ~$12/month for a Consumer Cellular (AT&T MVNO that doesn't suck) candybar that stays off the air most of the time, and is priceless even at 25 cents/minute in emergencies.
Land line != POTS line. Many landlines (including my own) are part of a Cable TV/Internet/Phone package and provided via your cable modem, which requires mains power from the house.
This seems the biggest problem. While there's good reception at home, on vacation we went some places where there was no signal. That's worse than the days before cellphones were ubiquitous because payphones aren't around much anymore.
> 2. Cell phones require power. In a prolonged power outage
A prolonged power outage is one case where solar chargers and portable battery chargers come in really handy. They also work if you are somewhere away from outlets for awhile, while land lines don't.
> 3. Cell phones get misplaced
True, but the difference between one landline per house (single point of failure) vs many cellphones (one per person) makes up for that somewhat.
Another problem is the way cellphones are over-provisioned; last time I was in a (minor, no injuries, but noticeable) earthquake, I couldn't make calls for some time afterwards.
This was back in the day, I was on a nokia communicator, which I mention because it had software such that I could send a text message, and it would keep retrying until it got through. I mention this because I was surprised to find that the behavior of the iphone is different. You have to manually retry.
Contrast that with my childhood neigbor pranking 911 from my home phone in the early 80s. The police knew where the call came from and showed up promptly.
However in a post-social media, post-internet, post-wireless world, every anecdotal failure will be documented as highly unusual and noteworthy. All of them. Therefore there will be a societal belief that 911 never works and only fails. Kind of like all jetliner flights end in crashes, because those are the only flights anyone ever hears about.
There is also a survivorship bias in that the only reports will be anecdotal awful ones. No one other than myself will go to the effort to post that in the last five years of GPS enabled smart phones I have only called 911 precisely one time for a minor property damage vehicle accident and the transfer time couldn't have been over five seconds (although in a stressful situation everything seems to slow down...)
I suspect that when a disaster happens and 100 people try to simultaneously call it in to a 10 person call center, the fact that the 95th person to report a crashed airplane took 5 minutes is utterly irrelevant to actual incident response latency. The trucks and sirens have already been rolling for almost 5 minutes, however frustrated the caller may be.
I think it goes without saying that cell phones were a very real regression for 911.
Haven't had a landline in years. I don't smoke, I don't binge drink. Hoping these stats don't end up affecting my insurance premiums.
"Compared with adults living in landline households, wireless-only adults were more likely to have their health status described as excellent or very good, more likely to have met the 2008 federal physical activity guidelines for aerobic activity (based on leisure-time activity), and less likely to have ever been diagnosed with diabetes." http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nhis/earlyrelease/wireless20151...
But even then, in multi-story buildings GPS may be hard to acquire in the first place.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Wireless_enhanc... for general information.
Instead, you should add the local emergency dispatch numbers to your phone as contacts. You can call the police station and ask for it - also ask them when it would be okay for you to call emergency dispatch to verify it routes correctly.
A lot of bay area numbers are listed here: http://www.ucop.edu/risk-services/_files/emergency/911local_...
Please stop what you are doing right now and program in the dispatch numbers for where you live and work.
Except that's not what they're saying. This is literally what they're saying: "You know, we can't say for certain; perhaps at that time dropping the landline was in effect risky behavior."
That doesn't really compute to me. My 80 year old grandparents have been cell phone only for about 5 years, because it's just as cheap as a landline and they can call from anywhere. Same with my 60 year old parents. It makes them feel safer to be able to call from the car in case their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. These are very conservative people. They own their house. They've had the same jobs for a decade+. They don't smoke. They drink moderately. The riskiest thing they do in any given day is drive to work. Granted, this is n=1, but I can name about half a dozen other households who are about the same in a very conservative rural area who have also dropped their land lines.
No, that's their explanation for why there might be a correlation. It's quite clearly not something they're actually certain about.
The only fact the CDC believes is that cell phone exclusivity correlates with risky behaviors.
This is an interview with NPR, not an academic paper. You may as well question whether the correlation exists at all as hone in on this one point.