Despite efforts to fix the problem, 911 dispatchers still struggle to locate injured people on Philly trails
An 81-year-old Center City resident fell and hit her head on the Schuylkill River Trail; 911 help was delayed.
Barbara Krassenstein was lying unconscious on the Schuylkill River Trail in Center City. Blood poured from a gash where the 81-year-old had fallen and smacked her forehead on the concrete path.
An unidentified Good Samaritan called 911. But help on that October morning was significantly delayed. The dispatcher had no idea how to pinpoint their location, according to Jessan Groenendyk, an avid cyclist who stopped to help and overheard the 911 call.
“The dispatcher was refusing to dispatch paramedics to a medical emergency because they required a ‘precise location’ and apparently ‘the Schuylkill River Trail under the 676 overpass’ is not precise enough,” Groenendyk recounted. “It could have been life-threatening.”
A spokesperson for Philadelphia Police Department, which runs the city’s 911 dispatch center, last week declined comment and refused to give The Inquirer the 911 recording, saying the Oct. 8 call remains under investigation. The spokesperson did say dispatchers, in general, can’t send help without first entering specific coordinates into the 911 computer system.
Cell-phone users can drop an electronic pin to meet up with friends or summon an Uber to their exact location with the touch of a button, but Philadelphia’s 911 emergency-response system remains spotty on the city’s nearly 200 miles of trails.
The problem, which is not unique to Philadelphia and occurs on trails statewide, generally happens when the 911 caller can’t identify a nearby cross street. The dilemma persists, despite the city’s effort to solve it about a decade ago, when the Department of Parks and Recreation put up “help locator” signs along the Schuylkill River Trail, Pennypack Trail, Tacony Trail, and various trails in the Wissahickon Valley Park. Parks and Recreation then distributed maps, marking each “help locator,” to police, fire, and ambulance responders.
“Nobody wants this to be a problem,” said Joseph Syrnick, president of the Schuylkill River Development Corporation (SRDC), a nonprofit focused on revitalization along the river’s banks. “I think dispatchers are always trying to genuinely get you help. They just don’t always know how to do it. You’d think in this day and age, it would be easy, but it’s not.”
The reasons include a lack of training or experience among new 911 dispatchers, uninformed trail users who don’t know to look for mile markers or help locators, and the limitations of today’s 911 technology.
Groenendyk, 28, sees a deeper issue at play too.
“I think the culture of America in general and Philadelphia in particular is one that prioritizes the safety and convenience of cars above all else,” said the Graduate Hospital resident. “Pedestrians and cyclists are treated as second-class citizens.”
Five broken bones, no ambulance
To gauge the frequency of the problem, an Inquirer reporter posted a query on r/phillycycling, an online community dedicated to biking in the Philadelphia region on the social media platform Reddit. Within hours, the post received dozens of comments in which Redditors recounted their own experiences with 911 dispatchers struggling to pinpoint their location on trails. The post had 70 comments and 10,000 views as of Wednesday.
One commenter, Matthew Cooper, said he was bicycling from Center City to his Roxborough neighborhood on the Schuylkill River Trail one evening in 2022 when he hit a pothole and launched over the handlebars. He suffered a concussion and five broken bones, including his shoulder blade and collarbone.
Another bicyclist stopped to help him and called 911, telling the dispatcher they were near the Schuylkill River Grandstand for regatta spectators along Kelly Drive. Cooper said the caller told him, “I can’t get them to come. They said they don’t know where you are.”
Eventually, the caller hung up and called an Uber to take Cooper home that night. The next morning, Cooper went to Roxborough Memorial Hospital, where he underwent surgery, he said.
“I wasn’t able to get an ambulance there when it was definitely needed,” Cooper, 34, said in an interview. “If a passerby who is not concussed isn’t able to communicate their location to 911, then how am I supposed to do it if I’m lying on the ground bleeding?”
In fall 2023 at about 4 p.m., Cooper said he was cycling on the same trail when he called 911 to report a group of motorbike riders who ran him off the path. He worried they would injure other trail users.
“They were like, ‘Yeah, we can’t take that report because you don’t have a cross street,’” Cooper recalled. “It’s crazy to me. I really think they need to have a solution to this because there are hundreds and hundreds of people every single day who use the Schuylkill River Trail.”
The SRDC’s Syrnick notes that some dispatchers manage to send help.
“Just to be clear, sometimes you call and that operator knows exactly where you’re talking about. It’s not broken all the time,” Syrnick said. “And it’s not always the operator’s fault. Sometimes they’re getting a bad description. I know people call up and say, ‘I don’t know where I am but there is a big bridge in front of me and it’s green,’ and the operator says, ‘Well, that’s not helping me.’”
“It’s frustrating for them, too,” Syrnick said, adding that it can be difficult to get location when 911 callers are understandably stressed and panicked in an emergency.
The dispatchers with more experience typically know how to locate people on trails, and if not, a call center supervisor usually steps in and figures it out, Syrnick said.
A 911 call system under fire
Retaining experienced 911 dispatchers, however, has been an ongoing problem.
The city’s 911 system came under scrutiny in July 2023 after authorities botched a response to a call that preceded a mass shooting in Kingsessing that left four people dead. In that case, officers were dispatched to the wrong location. It was unclear whether experience played any role in the mixup.
The Police Department, however, has had difficulty retaining the city’s roughly 300 dispatchers, in part, because of low pay and a lack of opportunity for career advancement.
Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s FY25 budget proposal, approved by City Council last year, includes several measures aimed at recruiting and retaining 911 dispatchers, including a 10% pay increase.
‘Training is key’
The Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency (PEMA) oversees the state’s 911 program, but each county runs it. None of the counties have technology that would enable 911 callers to use their smartphones to drop a locator pin or to download an app, which is how Uber works.
Without an exact address, 911 dispatchers use cell-phone tower triangulation to pinpoint the location of a mobile phone, but it’s not exact. And cell-phone connectivity can be an issue.
“A cell signal is only as strong as the network around it,” PEMA spokesperson Ruth Miller said. “That cell signal strength can be limited by surroundings — lots of trees, you’re in a valley, etc. It’s really important for folks who are going to be outdoors to make sure they let others know where they’re going.”
Sgt. Eric Gripp, a Philadelphia police spokesperson, said if 911 dispatchers have trouble locating a caller they can ask a supervisor to access a more precise locator tool called RapidSOS. Using RapidSOS, the supervisor would run the phone number to see where the cell phone was when it called 911, but the location is only available for a short time. The police can also execute a search warrant to the cell phone carrier’s provider to determine location in an emergency, Gripp said in an e-mailed statement.
Jennifer Cass, deputy director of Montgomery County’s Emergency Communications Division, said they’ve had an increase in emergency calls from her county’s portion of the SRT, though she’s unsure why.
Cass said 911 dispatchers are trained to ask trail users if they see a mile marker or help locator number, which are different.
“Training is key in any of this,” Cass said. “If you don’t have the training behind it and you get a call from the Schuylkill River Trail, it’s going to take you longer to process the call.”
Good Samaritans to the rescue
Groenendyk was bicycling home from an early-morning row on Oct. 8 when he came across the frustrated Good Samaritan trying to help Krassenstein, who was unconscious and bleeding on the trail underneath the I-676 underpass, not far from the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
At 7:27 a.m., he called his brother, a doctor, who told him how to apply pressure to the wound to slow the bleeding. A jogger, who identified himself as a doctor, also stopped to help.
“People shouldn’t have to wait for a bystander to come by who is a doctor,” Groenendyk said. “They should be able to call 911 and have an ambulance come.”
Krassenstein said she left her apartment to walk her 7-year-old dog, Savannah, at about 6:30 a.m. She saw another dog coming up the path.
“I said to myself, ‘That’s a big black dog. I’m going to have a problem,’ and that’s the last thing I remember” before falling, she said.
Krassenstein said she believes paramedics eventually did get on the trail with a gurney, though her memory is foggy. She was taken to Mercy Fitzgerald Hospital, where she got “quite a number” of stitches to her head, she said.
On New Year’s Eve, she took a reporter to the area on the trail where she fell. On a pole nearby, there was a small yellow sticker reading, “In Emergency Call 911 and give the location number: SR-078.”
“I didn’t know that was there until you told me and I walk up this trail every day,” Krassenstein said. “There’s no way you would know it’s there. There should be a big sign so you can see it.”