Emergency locators will mark River Trail

Handout
Plastic medallions like these are being installed at two-tenths of a mile intervals along the Arkansas River Trail by Little Rock, North LIttle Rock, Pulaski County and Pinnacle Mountain State Park. People who need emergency help along the trail can tell a 911 operator the code on the disc nearest to them, and MEMS will know right where they are..
Handout Plastic medallions like these are being installed at two-tenths of a mile intervals along the Arkansas River Trail by Little Rock, North LIttle Rock, Pulaski County and Pinnacle Mountain State Park. People who need emergency help along the trail can tell a 911 operator the code on the disc nearest to them, and MEMS will know right where they are..

North Little Rock and Little Rock parks workers began gluing thin plastic discs onto the Arkansas River Trail last week.

Eventually, 154 of these discs -- 911 emergency location markers -- will dot every two-tenths of a mile of the trail and some of its spurs, from downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock west through Pulaski County and into Pinnacle Mountain State Park (where they will be stuck to trailhead signs, because how do you glue plastic to a dirt path? You don't.).

When people get in trouble on the trail, sometimes they also have trouble telling emergency services where they are. Now they'll be able to look up their location by looking down -- along the side of the pavement that is closest to the river.

Each 4-inch medallion will bear the words "911 Emergency Location" and the name of the trail it touches. But the key part will be the letters and numbers in the center of the disc -- a code keyed to latitude and longitude coordinates.

Jon Swanson, executive director of Metropolitan Emergency Medical Services, says the discs will help MEMS assist the public.

"While current technology with cellphones allows us to get a pretty good approximate fix on somebody -- we know the general area -- if people can make reference to these medallions to give us their precise location, it will allow us to get to them a little quicker," he says.

Swanson says the codes will be uploaded to the MEMS database so when a caller to 911 knows the code of the nearest disc, the operator can pull up a map that pretty much pinpoints where he is. Possibly he'll be someplace an ambulance can't reach, but "when we know exactly where the person

is, we'll know the closest point where the vehicles can access the trail and whether we go left or right to get to them," Swanson says.

Swanson says MEMS isn't called often to rescue trail users, but it happens. And while on the site of some of these trail rescues, even he has had difficulty describing where he is: "It can be difficult to do. So the medallions will really eliminate any question about that."

He expects the codes to be of use even in the rural parts of Pulaski County where cell service can be spotty. Where cell towers are close together, as they are in the cities, triangulation provides a more accurate fix on a caller's location than is possible where towers are farther apart. Once someone finds a way to call 911, if he can tell the operator the code on a nearby disc, MEMS will know how to put an ambulance as close to him as possible.

The markers continue a project the Arkansas River Trail Task Force began in 2013 with the installation of way-finding signs. That project was funded by a grant from the National Park Service for the Challenge Cost Share Program. But these discs were bought by the cities, Pulaski County and Pinnacle Mountain State Park, with each government paying for the number that will be installed in its jurisdiction as well as some extras to replace any that might be lost to vandalism.

Each disc cost about $3, says Lynn Bell of Metroplan, who coordinated the purchase for the task force.

The fund is administered by Metroplan, the federally designated metropolitan planning organization for the four-county region of Faulkner, Lonoke, Pulaski and Saline counties.

Under a 2012 Memorandum of Understanding, the Arkansas River Trail System is expected to extend, eventually, 88 miles across several cities and counties.

ActiveStyle on 09/08/2014

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