Emergency call: ‘Can you extinguish the fire in my heart?’

Rescue-1122 report says 97% calls received since 2004 were bogus, most of the calls were made by women

LAHORE:

Of the 63 million calls received at District Control Rooms of the Punjab Emergency Service (Rescue-1122) since the service was launched in 2004, around 61 million calls (around 97 per cent) were “fake, obnoxious, distracting and time wasting”, according to an official report.

A little less than 2.2 million of the total calls were genuine requests for help in an emergency situation, the report said.

“It’s a tragedy. The rescue service that helps victims of emergencies is being pestered by crank callers,” Punjab Emergency Service Director General Rizwan Naseer said.



“Since its inception, only 2,168,898 calls out of the total 63,618,335 that the service has received in Districts Control Rooms across the Punjab were genuine,” he told The Express Tribune.

He said on average the Lahore District Control Room received between 4,000 and 4,500 calls a day; only 300 of them related to emergencies.

“Mostly, young girls from colleges and universities, perhaps sitting in groups, make fake calls. Most such calls are received during the morning shift,” Naseer said.

He urged the citizens to realise the importance of emergency services, their objectives and purpose.

A senior Rescue-1122 official said the majority of the crank calls were made by women “who wasted the precious time of the operators responding to the calls by flirting with them or trying to indulge them in immoral conversations”.

According to the call data, available with The Express Tribune, the majority of women crank callers often started the conversation with phrases like “I love you”, “I like your voice and would like to befriend you” or “Can you extinguish the fire that burns in my heart?”

“Women crank callers often insist that the staff taking their calls give them their personal phone numbers,” said the official who did not want to be named.

He said that every single call made to Rescue-1122 was recorded, for evaluating the response time and for reference.

Asked if the service had taken steps to check crank calls, Jam Sajjad Hussain, a spokesman for Rescue-1122, said, “We have developed a software that filters fake calls and permanently blacklists crank callers’ phone numbers after 10 bogus calls.”

Asked what if a fake caller actually met an emergency, Hussain said, “When a phone number is blacklisted after 10 crank calls, the caller is never entertained again.”

He said such callers should realise that their actions could cost someone’s life.

“Sometimes victims of emergencies fail to get prompt response as their calls are not put through to operators kept busy by crank callers.”

Hussain said there was a provision in the law for imposing a fine of Rs50,000, six-month imprisonment or both on fake callers; however no one had been penalised so far.

Emergencies and pranks:

According to the report, the Lahore District Control Room (DCR) received 13,315,850 calls but only 541,646 were genuine; Faisalabad DCR received a total of 5,409,247 calls of which only 223,177 related to emergencies; Gujranwala DCR received 4,482,253 calls, and only 133,933 were genuine; Multan DCR received 3,716,384 calls but only 183,450 were genuine; and Rawalpindi DCR received 3,302,384 calls, only 74,508 of which related to emergencies.

Naseer said that more than 2.4 million victims of different emergencies had been recued by Rescue-1122. These included 829,709 road accidents, 4,483 building collapse incidents, 4,794 incidents of drowning and 821 explosions. The Rescue-1122 Fire Service had responded to 52,066 fires.

Published in The Express Tribune, May 22^nd, 2014.