By WILLIAM MOORE, Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal, Tupelo The Tribune Content Agency
SALTILLO - Some residents of Lee County are already seeing the benefits of an enhanced mapping project that has been underway for nearly a year.
For the last 10 months, Lee County Communications Center mapping coordinator Charlie Dexter has been working to make sure every address in Lee County is not only registered with 911, but also assigned with the correct information and both street and GPS locations.
While the 911 maps are primarily used for getting first responders to an emergency, they have also helped people get their garbage picked up and even lower their insurance rates.
Working with Lee County Fire Coordinator Marc Flanagan, Dexter has been able to clear up addressing issues so residents can get their correct fire insurance rating and be assigned to the proper fire district.
"If we don't have the address in our 911 database, then that location is 'ungraded,' so it shows up as a fire insurance rating of 10 (the most expressive), no matter where they are," Dexter said.
If an address has not been assigned by 911, first responders may not be the only ones unable to find the address.
Dexter and coworker Samantha Ingram have also been comparing information and address lists with power and water systems, tax rolls and other services.
"All of the new places and new construction require 911 address verification. But we'll find older ones that will be on one list but not on ours," Dexter said. "Sometimes we will have an address that the solid waste department will not have. Often, those are the people calling complaining that their garbage is not getting picked up."
A few key strokes later, regular trash collection is arranged.
Correcting issues with addresses is one of the biggest problems Dexter faces, in particular with people using addresses that were never formally issued. Sometimes a contractor will build a new house and "give" it the next number. If it is next to 121, the new house must be 123. If the new house is a duplex, it must be 123A and 123B.
Other problems with addresses happened when the county 911 system switched programs from one that just used addresses to one that incorporates multiple maps. In some cases, an address never migrated into the new system. There have also been cases where someone built a structure on a formerly abandoned property and used the old address, that might have predated 911.
Lee Communications works with the residents and the post office to get the issues resolved. Many times it's just a matter of getting all the data, and they end up being assigned the same address they were using.
Most of the issues are small, but correcting them now is important.
"It's a lot of little problems that add up and can pose a bigger problem down the road," Dexter said.
What's down the road is the next generation 911, which will look closer at cellular data. Instead of just looking at a cell tower and a several mile variance, it will pinpoint a cellular caller within 20 feet.
Dexter would like to see 75 percent accuracy in the map by the spring of 2025.
Getting the map data clean and accurate will have several side benefits. Most people have tried to look up an address in Google maps and ended up somewhere completely different. Sometimes the glitch is because there are two or more streets with almost identical names - like Peachtree Road and Peachtree Street.
"I spent four hours recently correcting an issue with three streets in Tupelo but would ping in Baldwyn," Dexter said. "I had to go through each section (of data) to figure out the problem."
Once the data is as clean and accurate as possible, the system will be reinitiated, which should solve most of the issues. The new corrected data will be shared with Google. The changes will be slowly integrated into their maps.
In addition to cleaning up the maps, Dexter would like to see Lee County go one step further and add additional information about each address. That can be as simple as noting whether a residence is a standard house or a mobile home, and whether it is a residence, business or commercial.
The ultimate goal is to get an image of each address included in the map database. That would give first responders a visual representation of where they are going. It would also have a more long-term far-reaching effect in the case of a disaster.
If a massive tornado destroyed a part of the county like one that hit Smithville in 2011, the county would have a readily available database of structures before they were destroyed. That would allow the county to quickly compile an application for disaster relief from FEMA. And the quicker the application, the quicker the funds could be disbursed.
"We hope to move the county into a place where we are prepared to respond to a crisis and are prepared for a crisis," Dexter said. "If you don't prepare, the response is exponentially harder."
The images could also help individual families in the case of a smaller scale disaster, like a house file.
"People usually have pictures of their house, but an insurance company would be hard pressed to contest an image from a government-maintained database," Dexter said.
Once completed, Lee County will be one of just a handful of counties in Mississippi to get ahead of the curve and be ready for the next generation of 911.