Officials seeking to correct 911 records
By John Tompkins
The Facts
Published June 10, 2007
ANGLETON — Some phone numbers in Brazoria County are not reporting the location they should, and that could delay response when a person with one of those numbers calls 911 for emergency services.
In the attempt to clear up the problem, officials are calling numbers on an error report to verify and change the address in the system, officials said.
There are more than 700 numbers that show up in the error report conducted by the county’s 911 administrators because the residence attached to a particular number does not match the number in the system’s database, said Penny Goode, the county’s 911 administrator.
“If that person calls 911, it will take awhile to get through the proper channels,” Goode said. “We originally started out with 2,900.”
Many of the affected homes are due to new subdivisions under construction, people moving to a different residence and taking their phone number with them or a recent conversion which required homeowners to have a physical address available in the database as opposed to a post office box or rural route number, said Nancy Cleveland, the county’s 911 data technician.
“A lot of those numbers are also second lines” that are used by the homeowners as an Internet line, Cleveland said.
The county is working with the Houston-Galveston Area Council to help find the proper physical address for each of the numbers on the error report, Goode said. They council has been calling the numbers and asking for the proper physical address, she said.
“It’s really nothing to worry about,” Goode said.
Residents who have moved within the county and want to ensure their address is correct on the 911 database can take matters into their own hands and call the telephone company, Cleveland said.
Residents must give a physical address to the phone company in order to be updated into the database, she said. Post office boxes and rural route numbers can be used only as a billing address, Cleveland said.
John Tompkins is a reporter for The Facts. Contact him at (979) 849-8581.
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