Residents who screen calls through Verizon can’t get messages.
By: David Campbell
Princeton Township residents who screen calls through their Verizon telephone service will not be alerted by the township in case of an emergency.
That’s because Verizon cannot distinguish the brief recorded message that would be relayed to residences by the township’s new emergency phone alert system in the event, for example, of a water main break from the sorts of pesky telemarketing calls the phone company regularly screens for customers.
"Until Verizon can get new software and new technology to allow emergency calls to get past blocking and screening, there is no way we’ll be able to notify these people," said Theodore Cashel, the township’s fire official and emergency management coordinator.
The township discovered the glitch during five separate tests begun in October, the most recent of which was conducted last week on a block of 80 residences, Mr. Cashel said.
The township purchased the phone service last year from Community Action Network (CAN), a high-speed telephone company based in Albany, N.Y.
The service costs about $15,600 and includes a per-use fee and a $6,900 annual renewal fee. It has the capability to call up to 15,000 numbers an hour, and a software mapping package enables the township to issue a blanket alert or limit it to affected areas.
Should an emergency such as a water main break occur, a township official can call the network from work, home or a cellular phone, provide a password, then tape a short message to be phoned to residences and businesses advising of the incident with instructions to boil water.
During recent tests, some emergency calls were blocked by caller ID, a problem Mr. Cashel said was easily solved. But others were blocked by Verizon’s call-screening service, a problem for which the township has not yet found a solution.
Caller ID boxes that display the name and phone number of a caller registered the emergency calls as "out of area" because they could not identify CAN, which operates 256 outgoing phone lines, Mr. Cashel said.
That problem was solved with a phone call to the company, which agreed to register its calls under "CAN emergency," which will now be the display that appears on caller ID screens, he said.
Working around the Verizon screening function is not so easy because the phone company’s electronic system cannot distinguish the emergency calls from sales calls.
Only about 2 percent of residences tested since October about 10 to 12 households experienced this problem, Mr. Cashel said.
But efforts to notify those residents of the problem have been unsuccessful because Verizon protects the confidentiality of its customers who use call screening and will not release their names, even to a municipal agency, he said.
The township discovered the problem from fax reports provided by CAN, which indicate which calls were delivered, got no answer or a recorded message, and which were intercepted by an operator, Mr. Cashel said.
The CAN system is otherwise working well and will be up and running after five more tests to be conducted this month, he said.
The Princeton Borough Council will consider a less technical method of volunteer block captains for alerting residents of an emergency.
Under a proposal being prepared by Kurt Stenn of the Princeton Regional Health Commission, each residential block in the borough, which is more densely populated than the township, would have a "captain" to sound an alert door-to-door in a system similar to neighborhood alerts deployed during World War II.
Mr. Cashel called the borough proposal "extremely laborious at best," citing the more than 200 telephone calls that would have to be made notifying all the volunteers, and the uncertainty that volunteers will be at home when the calls are made.
The township is prepared to include the borough in its CAN program if the borough agrees to pay the township’s annual renewal fee through 2005, but to date the cost-conscious borough has declined, Mr. Cashel said.
Princeton Township Committeewoman Casey Hegener, who is committee liaison to the health commission, said the borough should join the phone system, calling block captains "anachronistic in the 21st century."