911 for Special Needs

"Safety is a cheap and effective insurance policy" - Unknown

In the state of Connecticut, AT&T supports a 9-1-1 Special Needs program for your landline phone at home. Just fill out and mail this form to let 9-1-1 know of any of the following:

• Blind
• Cognitive Impaired or Psychiatric Impaired
• Hard of Hearing / Deaf / TDD
• Life Support System
• Mobiliy Impaired
• Speech Impaired

I have not found anything similar for other states but I did look at 9-1-1 services for the deaf.

Start with the website www.deaf911.com/. It has radio buttons to select the emergency - Police or Fire/Rescue and then a drop down box to select a state. I have not tested it beyond that since the site posts a warning against "prank" calls.

According to this article, the Los Angeles police dept is looking at ways to support 9-1-1 texting.

Bottom Line

According to National Emergency Number Association, 9-1-1, the government proposed an national emergency number in 1967 and AT&T began implementing it in 1968 with Alabama and Alaska as early adopters. (Was AT&T implementing it alphabetically by state?) Today 96% of the geographic USA is covered by 9-1-1. (I wonder where the gaps are?). Additional facts about 9-1-1 can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9-1-1

Note also that while 9-1-1 works in the US and Canada, other countries use different emergency numbers:

000 Emergency phone number in Australia.
100 Emergency phone number in India.
111 Emergency phone number in New Zealand.
112 Emergency phone number across the European Union and on GSM mobile networks across the world.
119 Emergency phone number in parts of East Asia.
311 Non-emergencies telephone in US and Canada.
999 Emergency phone number in Ireland, Poland and United Kingdom (where it works parallel to 112)
108 Emergency telephone number in India.
192 Emergency telephone number in Macedonia