COUNTY MOVES AHEAD WITH ENHANCED 911 SYSTEM

If all goes as planned, the Enhanced 911 will go on board early next week in Cape Girardeau County. The service will advance emergency response by leaps and bounds.

This system brings 911 service to the city of Jackson and homes and businesses serviced by the Cape County Sheriff's Department. The city of Cape Girardeau has had 911 for some time, but this new system offers so much more. State-of-the-art technology will provide the name and address of the caller within seconds. That wasn't an option previously. It can also help officers trace calls that are disconnected or lost for whatever reason.

The Cape County Sheriff's Department carries the system even further -- it has purchased an option that provides a routing map with the name and address. This addition makes sense since the sheriff's department has a much greater area to cover.

The equipment has been in place for some time, and testing has been conducted for over a month. Members of the E911 advisory board will meet today to discuss the status of the system and decide if it's ready to go on line. If so, service could begin as soon as Tuesday.

We commend the advisory committee, led by Brian Miller, for its hard work to implement the system. The process of renaming and readdressing much of rural Cape Girardeau County was mammoth task, and the committee proceeded at an admirable pace with few problems. E911 was approved by the county nearly two years ago -- Nov. 5, 1991. Conscientious citizens voted themselves higher phone bills to pay for the service.

The E911 system also has the capacity to include medical information for callers. But that option has not been exercised at the start. Simply matching all phones numbers with names and addresses was a monumental task in itself. All county addresses were given city-style street addresses. We feel down the road this option could prove beneficial, especially for people with special medical problems.

For citizens, the system is easy. We only must remember three things: 9 1 1. The system does the rest.

Calls are automatically routed through the main Southwestern Bell computer. A name and address linked to the phone number is automatically accessed, and sent to Cape County's E911 computers. Calls in the Cape Girardeau and Jackson will be automatically transferred to central dispatching facilities in those towns, while all other calls will be dispatched to the sheriff's department. Central dispatching will then notify police, fire or ambulance.

But callers are reminded to use E911 only in the case of a true emergency. It's not the place to call for weather reports or icy road conditions. Pranksters and others who are abusing E911 should remember that this system provides a way to trace all calls. As long as the last "1" makes it to the Southwestern Bell computer, the call will go through, say authorities. There will be no anonymous numbers any more.

To make this system more effective, county residents are being asked to exhibit their house number in easy-to-read letters on mailboxes or on the front of their homes. Hundreds of new county street signs will be installed.

This new Enhanced 911 gives emergency responders in Cape Girardeau County an edge. This new data will speed up emergency responses. And in matters of life and death, there's nothing more important than time.