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Using Twitter to summon emergency help
Leader of the Conservative Party David Cameron visits Windsor Fire Station, October 27, 2009 in Windsor, England.
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On the face of it, it sounds crazy: Your house or apartment is on fire, and rather than phoning the emergency services, you tweet them.
But that is what the London Fire Brigade is mulling over. The Brigade is investigating whether it should allow people to use social media to report a fire and summon help.
Glenn Sebright, spokesman for the fire service, says they must at least consider this new approach -- because so many Londoners own smart phones and use social media.
“In effect, it would irresponsible of us not to look at how we might need to respond to incidents that are reported by members of the public using Twitter or using other forms of social media,” says Sebright.
Many questions will have to be answered: Will the public fully trust Twitter to convey such a vital message as “My house is on fire!” Don’t people need the reassurance of a voice at the other end of the line?
Supporters of the new approach point to the past: When Britain’s emergency phone services -- the equivalent of 911 -- were set up in 1935 many skeptics said the system would never work.
And yet today these services handle 30 million emergency calls a year.
This idea is well beyond silly.
If you have any sense at all, regarding emergency calls, it's most obvious that a huge percentage of individuals are very distressed and in a condition of possible impairment to the degree that entering any information of a typewritten nature could be erroneous, scrambled, or misleading.
An actual person on the phone, giving immediate feedback, confirming addresses and situations and so on is much to be preferred for quite some time.
This is not to say that supplemental information via written communications should not be considered. It would be helpful to inform officials, after an initial call that all kknown occupants were safetly outside of a burning building, etc.
Phone interchange is massively preferable--and the waiting and wondering if anyone 'heard' a sent emergency message is totally unacceptable.
