The majority of people that call 911 in our region speak to an operator asking them if they want police, fire or ambulance. The various police and fire agencies in each city get calls for their community downstreamed to them, but if you ask for the ambulance, you get BCAS. We are the only game in town, and as such take a lot of requests for help from a large population.
Sometimes, when the calls are put through to us they disconnected or we lose the caller for various reasons: caller hung up, bad cell connection, etc… A coworker and friend picked up a 911 call like this early in his shift recently. When he answered the phone, “BC Ambulance Service, for what city?”, he heard a baby crying in the background and man’s voice. Then the line went dead.
Cell phones and 911 can be a pain in the @$$. All we know is the address of the cell phone tower near the patient but not the patient’s actual location. Lack of this address location information makes our jobs a lot harder if the caller isn’t able to tell us where they are. This particular caller called from a cell phone. The next step is the most obvious: call them back.
No answer. Next, the call taker phoned Telus (the predominant phone company here) to try to find an address. Telus told us it was a Telus Mobility number and to call them. After calling them the call taker was told that it was actually a Bell cell phone number and to call them. The call taker worked to find a billing address from Bell who refered him to their security department. As you can imagine, this has a low probability of success due to the ‘mobile’ nature of mobile phones. The cell phone security division provided us with a billing address and a landline phone number.
He tried a call to the landline number – Pizza Hut??? No one at Pizza Hut needed our help.
The call taker, finding this a little odd, phoned the police to have them attend at the address with us for our crew’s safety. The event was created and an ambulance is started on the way.
One final attempt by the call taker was made to call the cell phone. SUCCESS!! The voice he heard earlier answered the phone:
“Hello sir … did you call 911 and disconnected? Can we help you?”
“I was worried about my friend, but everything is alright now.”
“Alright, did you hang up on 911?”
“Yup. I hung up to go check on my friend.”
The outcome? Well, a call taker in a very busy communication centre took almost 30 minutes to try to track down a caller who didn’t need help. All he needed to do was tell us he no longer required help before disconnecting.
There is a lot emphasis placed on not making prank 911 calls. I would say that these types of calls happen far more often than prank calls. Many people don’t dial ‘9′ then ‘1′ and wait to dial the last ‘1′ to be sure they are needed. They dial up the whole number and give little thought to the consequenses of hanging up before making contact.
Please don’t hang up. We’ll try for a long time to track you down assuming the whole time you desperately need help.
