CLEVELAND -- A woman was involved in an accident on a rural Stark County road, but NewsChannel5's Ron Regan reported that the real accident may have come after she used her cell phone to call for help.

"I saw him swerve, he went left of center and back across and then he was coming at me head on," said Pam Harpring, accident victim.

She said she will never forget what happened, especially when she depended on her cell phone.

"So, I had dialed 911 and they came on," Harpring said.

But help wasn't coming. And her cellular 911 call triggered the confusion, Regan said.

"Are you in Stark County, do you know?" a dispatcher asked.

"Yes, Stark," Harpring said.

"OK, I'll have to call them, because you got Carroll County," the dispatcher said.

"I said, 'I didn't dial anybody. I dialed 911'" Harpring said.

Regan investigated what really happens when you call 911 on your cell phone and how your call for help winds up miles away.

"They're banking on when they dial 911, they will receive help and they have no idea that this call will be answered by people out of the county or out of the country," said Dan Claypool, Ashtabula County Emergency Management.

Unlike your home phone, 911 cell calls reveal nothing about your location, Regan reported. But even more alarming, dispatchers said cell calls bounce to the first available tower.

"911 will get you a tower site, but it may not be a tower anywhere near where the event's occurring," said Lt. Larry Greene with the Lake County Sheriff's Department.

And Regan reported that it can cost life-saving seconds.

"I did call 911 again. It seemed like so much time went by and thinking of the confusion from the first call I had made," Harpring said.

A second 911 call bounced an entire county away, again.

"OK, I'll call Stark County and let them know," a dispatcher said.

"It just seemed like we were there forever," Harpring said.

But Regan found an ambulance just 1 mile away from the crash site. The fire chief said it was never dispatched.

"So I called my dispatching service and they didn't have any knowledge of it. So I called them (Stark County Sheriff's Department) and they said they got the call from Carroll Com, another dispatching service and that's why we were never called," said Dave Ball, Robertsville fire chief.

In the 911 confusion, an ambulance 8 miles away finally got the call.

"And if we could get them sooner, we could be the dividing point between living or dying," Ball said.

Harpring escaped serous injury, but 911 cellular calls remain in critical condition, Regan said.

"I just know we were cold and my husband said, 'Get in the car.' At this point, we were shook but nobody was around to help us," Harpring said.