Surely many wondered if the emergency number in the United States was changed to the short number 911 after the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Let’s make a reservation right away – no, this can be considered an ordinary coincidence, or the idea of those people who arranged it in order to add a little more mystery to this already historical episode. On September 11, 2001, dialing this number was almost impossible.
Until the 1960s, there was no single telephone number in the United States that Americans could call if they needed police or fire assistance. Subscribers simply had to know the telephone number for each department in the area in which they were currently located. In the case of large cities, there were often several police and fire departments covering different areas.
For example, Los Angeles had fifty different police departments and the same number of telephone numbers. Telephone operators, as a rule, had to not receive emergency calls, if the caller was not sure which department or phone number they needed, he was informed that he should have found out the exact number, having called him, he would be helped later. There were often delays in police or fire brigades when the clerks answering the phone were busy with another caller. Needless to say, this system was not optimized to provide emergency assistance where it needed to be reached very quickly.
Just over a decade after Congress established the country’s universal telephone number, 9-1-1, approximately 26% of United States citizens could dial 9-1-1 and contact local emergency services. It may surprise you that even 25 years ago, in 1989, this number only increased by 50%. However, just ten years later, it grew to 93% of the country. Today, approximately 99% of people in the United States have access to the 9-1-1 emergency telephone system.
