Think about 911 before ditching your landline

..."911 is sometimes an afterthought," said Daniel Dunlap, Okaloosa County's 911 coordinator.

When a call comes through a landline, a 911 dispatch center can see the caller's physical address at the least, Dunlap said. If you're choking and can't speak, rescuers will still know where to go.

A cell phone call, on the other hand, uses global positioning technology to create a map that helps rescuers locate a caller. Triangulation between three towers pinpoints the location, but even then the result may be off by about 300 meters.

"It might just give me a general location," Dunlap said. "Sometimes, we get the location of the nearest cell tower instead of the cell phone."...