Weird Calls to 9-1-1
Prince George, B.C. – E-Comm handles the 9-1-1 calls from the Regional District of Fraser Fort George, as well as 23 other regional districts and communities in the province. And some of the calls in 2016 were anything but an emergency.
Call-takers Jim Beland and Chris Faris had the top two 9-1-1 nuisance calls of the year: a broken gym locker and someone enquiring about job opportunities with the police.
“I’d like to be able to say that calls such as the ones on our top ten list are rare, but unfortunately this isn’t the case,” says Beland. “As call-takers our job is to treat each call like an emergency until we can determine otherwise, and this takes time. We want our time reserved for people who need help because they have a legitimate emergency.”
Chris Faris agrees. “Unfortunately, we do get a lot of people who call 9-1-1 thinking it can be used as an information hotline. We get a lot of calls that start off with ‘this is not an emergency but…’ and that’s a concern when we know there are other people out there who need our help.”
Here are the top ten nuisance calls to E-Comm 9-1-1 in 2016:
1. Requesting help opening a broken gym locker
2. Enquiring about job opportunities for a family member interested in police work
3. Because an electric shaver would not turn off
4. Requesting a ladder to get a soccer ball off the roof
5. How best to get a drone down from a tree
6. Tired of waiting in traffic
7. “There’s a big spider in the bathroom”
8. Complaining they couldn’t get into a nightclub
9. Because their teenager refused to do chores
10. “Can you tell me what time it is?”
E-Comm receives approximately 1.35 million calls every year to 9-1-1 and any time a 9-1-1 line is taken up for a reason that does not require immediate action from emergency services, lives could be at risk.
Comments
There are a certain amount of People that are not exactly the brightest in our society and really don’t know how to use emergency services like 911.
I have had to use 911 on a couple of occasions for medical emergencies and I am happy that I got through but I do know some who got busy signals or were put on hold trying to get through to 911 and let me tell you when that is the only number you can remember in an emergency and you can’t get through it is a scary feeling
The solution is simple, keep these morons on the line long enough to send the cops and arrest them followed by a $10,000.00 fine. 9-11 is not new, it is not a hard concept to grasp, and obviously polite reminders are not working.
You actually don’t need to keep anyone on the line. That’s a myth. The system has all your info, the second you call. Meanwhile, good luck with fines. You have no clue how many people call 911 by accident.
Neither do you sunshine, how do you dial 9-11 by accident? Besides what number do you dial to ask for a ladder to get a soccer ball off the roof, 8-11?
What’s the value of publishing this? You are just drawing attention to the gag, and more idiots are going to call hoping to make the news. Honestly, you guys should think about some of the ‘news’ you publish.
This is called education you might of learned of the word in school
It’s educating people about the use of 911 and how it’s supposed to be used
Isthisreallife how would you suggest the media report it
Really, we need to educate people on the proper etiquette of using “911”??
Ok……to educate these ridiculous callers to 911, they need fines….big fines.
That way, when this yearly compilation of abuses gets published- with each entry the fine should be published. That would be called “educating the masses that there are penalties for these kinds of abuses to our 911.
But then the stupidity of these calls may indicate they don’t know how to read…….not sure how to deal with that!!
I’m not going to point out the irony in your response. If you are going to call me out on ‘education’ at least form a legible sentence, and a brush up on your paragraph structure.
MSM (Main Stream Media) is proven responsible for copycat crimes, hoaxes etc, whenever they report this crap. It’s why people remember the names of the criminals, and not the victims.
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