As children, we learn what to do in an emergency. We memorize our home phone number in case we get lost, we are told to tell an adult if we have an accident and we learn the number to dial in case of fire or other life-threatening danger. We hope we never have to call 911, but we are confident that, when we do dial the number, emergency responders will be on the scene within minutes to deal with whatever problem we face. However, this entire process relies on one key fact: when we dial 911, we get in touch with the public safety communications center that is closest to us, not one, say, in an entirely different country.

Well, that is exactly what happened to a school district in the small town of Manhattan, Illinois. Administrators were forced to call 911 when a pair of kindergarteners went missing, but instead of reaching local operators, the call was routed to an emergency call center in Canada. Yes, Canada.

Mark Fletcher, E911 expert at Avaya (News - Alert), recently blogged about this incident, indicating that the exact reason for the misrouting was not yet known. There are some who have the knee-jerk reaction that the VoIP technology utilized by the school was to blame, that the location of the company’s SIP trunk caused the problem, or that the issue was rooted in the VoIP positioning center.

In reality, it could have been any number of steps in the process that could have caused this unacceptable situation. The fact of the matter is, everyone wants to feel secure that 911 calls will be routed properly and that emergency responders will arrive on the scene quickly and without incident. In order to ensure that there are no routing problems, companies should consider E911 hosted solutions, like those provided by 911 ETC, to give them the peace of mind that their emergency calls will be handled quickly and efficiently – and in the correct country!