SAN DIEGO -- When your house is on fire, you phone 9-1-1. But when it's the whole city that's going up in flames, you call ... whom?
The answer, at least during last month's California wildfires, turned out to be the social services help line 2-1-1, which in San Diego County and much of the United States normally provides non-emergency advice to the community.
Workers at San Diego's 2-1-1 call center are accustomed to guiding people to community resources ranging from help with an aging parent to finding safe preschool care to learning English or applying for the earned-income tax credit. But as fires here forced the evacuation of half a million people and destroyed 1,200 homes, 2-1-1 received more than 110,000 calls -- a year's worth -- in five days.
"We got calls for needs ranging from finding shelter to help with utilities and mortgage problems," says Linda Daily, 2-1-1 director for United Way. "San Diego's 2-1-1 system had to take on 1,200 volunteers to handle the calls that came in that week."
Now national social-services groups, including the United Way, are turning the heat up on a national campaign to make the service universal throughout the United States. They're supporting legislation before Congress that would create a single federal-funding source and uniform requirements for service, bringing an end to the current patchwork approach.
Though Daily estimates that 65 percent of the country has some form of 2-1-1 -- usually in larger urban areas -- it hasn't come to cell phone or VOIP users yet. And pay phones, often privately owned, don't have any obligation to provide 2-1-1 services.
"It's laborious to have to go from carrier to carrier to have it set up and to have to scrounge for funding under each region's regulatory scheme," she says. "It's an idea whose time has come, and a disaster like the San Diego fires shows us how much it can help."
A national 2-1-1 plan was first conceived about 10 years ago and approved in theory by the Federal Communications Commission in 2000, then sent to individual states to decide how to implement it. Some states, including Connecticut and Wisconsin, have statewide systems. Other states, like Texas, have county-by-county systems. Still others, like Florida, offer no state funding or support.
"It's a spotty system, and each locality has jurisdiction over whether or not it exists," Daily says. "Not all the phone service providers are on board, and because of different laws and regulations in each state, there is no universal way to set it up."
If fully supported, 2-1-1 can be a vital hub for emergency information in a disaster, says Larry Olness, one of 22 disaster responders who traveled to San Diego to work the phones and train volunteers during the fires.
"In day-to-day operations we rely on computer databases to guide people to good help," says Olness, of Orlando, Florida. "In a disaster, there's a struggle to keep information current and timely, when things like evacuations and road closures can change minute-to-minute."
Hurricane Katrina in 2005 was the defining moment for 2-1-1, Daily says. Because of the flooding, calls for help were forwarded to other phone banks, many to Monroe, Louisiana, but also to half a dozen other cities where volunteers became the primary source for information for hurricane victims.
