By Jessica Rosenworcel and Betty Wafer, The Hill
Summer is here and the living is easy. It’s the season for backyard barbeques, outside play, and long, leisurely nights. It’s also accident season. That means the number of trips to emergency rooms multiply—and the number of calls to 911 rise.
Summer may be the busy season, but calls to our national emergency number never really stop. In fact, today we call 911 roughly 240 million times a year. More than 70 percent of those calls come from wireless phones rather than traditional landline phones. In other words, the bulk of our emergency calls come over a different technology than the 911 system was designed to use.