I got a little card in my mailbox the other day with a number of phone numbers in case of emergency. There was a number for the police, the fire dept, and an ambulance.
It dawned on me that I don’t know the number to call in case of emergency. I mean, do I have to remember a number for all of them in case I need them? Is there a 911* that connects me with whatever I emergency service I might need?
Moreover, if there is, are there industrialized countries that don’t have a 911 number.
*obviously, I know the number might or might not be 9-1-1. Just an example.
I read an article not to long ago where Australia was having issues with to many people dialing 911 in emergencies. 911 didn’t conect to anything. Basicaly it was the fault of imported american programs and stupid tourists. They didn’t could to a resolution. The phone companies didn’t seem to want to help. Maybe its been resolved?
In South Korea, it’s 119. Information is 114. When I lived in West Germany, the public phones had a cool thing. You didn’t actually dial a number. You moved a lever to one side for the fire department and to the other side for the police.
It’s not that the phone companies didn’t want to help, more that they couldn’t. The 9 series of numbers is allocated for other purposes. You pass the number to the phone company one digit at a time, and the hardware isn’t set up to deal with part of a number going to one place, and an 8 digit number starting the same way going somewhere else. Mobile phone companies, where the whole number is known before you start, usually have a redirect of 911 to the local emergency number.
The 112 number is supposed to be the international mobile phone emergency number, and should work world-wide, but in some cases it doesn’t actually go to the same place as the local number (000, 911 etc) would. It should eventually, but it may go through another call center first before being re-routed. It is worth finding out what the local emergency number is (before you need it) and using that.
Same thing happened in New Zealand after Rescue 911(TV Show) became a big hit. They phone companies changed their system so that 911 re-routed through to 111(NZ’s emergency number)
On the Canadian side of the Great Lakes mariners can use *16 on their cell phones to call for search and rescue. This is a fairly new service (the norm is for mariners to use VHF radio chanel 16 for rescue).
In Norway, it’s 110 for Fire, 112 for Police, 113 for Ambulance.
However, because 112 is the European standard, if you dial that number your call can be forwarded to any emergency service. No, I do not know why they don’t just move them all to 112 and be done with it. Remember, I just live here :smack:
In Israel 100 is police, 101 is medical and 102 is fire. There’s been talk for a while now of uniting them into one emergency call center, but its been bogged down by beaurocracy, conflicting jurisdictions, budget, etc.
Still, if you call the wrong number they’ll probably transfer you to the one you need.
They have now bought in a non-emergency number in the UK. This is because up to 20% of people who dial 999 do not need an emergency agency to deal with their problems. Some of the requests are trivial to say the least, as this website shows.
The new number is 101 and there is a flat fee of 10p for each call.
Germany also doesn’t have one unified emergency number - it’s 112 for fire/medical and 110 for police. There dont’t seem to be a significant number of calls for the two numbers to be folded into one - it seems people do know whether they need the fire brigade or the police. Mobile phone emergency number is 112, of course, as it seems to be in the neighbouring countries.
Specialist emergency hotlines usually encourage people to call them directly - I for one have e.g. the numbers of a poison hotline, our local police nonemergency number and the German maritime SAR contact number stored in my mobile phone.
India has a system similar to the one in Israel. There also have been proposals to unify the numbers, but has met with the same barriers described by Alessan.
I’ve always thought this was a strange situation - if anything in this world should be standardised as universal, it should be the emergency number. But even now, it is not the case.