Casper, Wyoming Contracts CompassCom to Achieve E911 Compliance

CENTENNIAL, COLO. – 20 February 2003

Casper, Wyoming has selected CompassCom Inc. to upgrade surrounding Natrona County’s mapping database to a digital system that will be E911 Phase II compliant. The digital map database will enable Casper dispatchers to pinpoint the locations of incoming 911 calls from both cellular and wireline telephones throughout the county, resulting in faster and more accurate response to emergencies.

With a population of 66,000, Natrona County is located in central Wyoming, a predominantly rural area that includes the city of Casper. Natrona is among a growing number of U.S. counties converting to digital maps in response to a Federal Communications Commission mandate requiring E911 systems to be able to trace wireless calls. Digital street addressing already exists for Casper, and the system will be expanded to the entire county.

“With estimates of more than 35 percent of all 911 emergency calls coming from wireless phones, it is imperative for counties to have accurate data to reach emergency situations,” said CompassCom President/CEO W. Brant Howard.

CompassCom is using a variety of digital mapping technologies, including driving street centerlines on many county roads with a GPS-equipped vehicle to build the new map database. The new map is geocoded, which means that locations of wireless telephone calls can be pinpointed by latitude/longitude coordinates anywhere in the county – the core requirement of E911 Phase II compliance.

Natrona also requested CompassCom to upgrade the street addressing capabilities of the E911 dispatch system from ‘range addressing’ to what is called ‘structure addressing.’ To accomplish this, CompassCom is mapping the precise locations of 6,000 building structures in the rural county so that when a wireline E911 call is placed from one, the dispatcher will see that structure’s actual location on the map screen. Under the standard range addressing method, only the approximate location of the call is given, which can be inaccurate by up to a mile in a rural region.

“One of the most important reasons our community chose to do this was to increase speed and efficiency when we receive incoming 911 calls. We did not want to have a situation where an emergency vehicle was dispatched to a wrong street address, simply because our address database was incorrect,” said Liz Hepp, City GIS Coordinator for the City of Casper.

CompassCom was established in 1994 as a product and service provider for Global Positioning System (GPS), Geographic Information System (GIS), and Automatic Vehicle Location (AVL) markets. CompassCom offers complete GPS and GIS solutions as a business partner with Trimble Navigation and ESRI Inc.

For more information contact:

CompassCom
Kevin Corbley
970-266-9292
www.compasscom.com