Allegheny County is the only metropolitan area in the country without a coordinated 911 system. Many have attributed the lack of quick, adequate response time to further injury and even unnecessary deaths.

Last September, Cindy Cress of Monroeville found that her infant son Robert stopped breathing. A visitor at Cress' home inadvertently dialed 911, instead of the seven-digit emergency number originally tailored to be specific to the Monroeville area. This fatal mistake added as much as four minutes to the response time.

Since then, Cress has been rallying in attempt to jump start the mounds of sticky red tape which surrounds the failed status of up-to-date emergency dialing for most of the county's suburban residents. Recently, Cress presented petitions with 2,000 signatures to Allegheny County's 911 coordinator Brad Magill.

Magill, hired last year to begin the county's long-stalled task to implement a countywide 911 service, has been waiting for approval for a revised plan that could bring 911 to some suburbs by the year's end. The proposed plan calls for five or six answering points instead of the forty-one envisioned in an earlier plan, since having forty-one centers would require needless duplication of sophisticated equipment and cause a frenzy of misdirected calls.

Apparently, the several years of delay in implementing this 911 plan were due to uncooperative suburban leaders who refused to give up control of their dispatch operations. Hopefully, a decision will come soon in order to circumvent any further needless loss of lives.

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