Very recently Galicia (Spain) opened its Twitter account @incendios085,
whose main objective is to encourage citizens to call the firefighters
emergency number (085) in case they see fire in the woods, according to its
Twitter profile, where they also use the hashtag #SeVesLume085 (if you see fire call 085). Galicia decided to promote the old firefighters number (085), due to disappear, even though the emergency number is 112. The account is not a fake, but sure it is a fail.
Also the Canarias’ Government was the first autonomy in Spain to have their own app to
monitor emergencies, capable of making the reserve 112 a reality attending calls
in many European languages. Despite the fact that all ways to communicate an
emergency are legitimate, the question I’d like to address here is whether they represent an improvement or a
drawback.
Let’s try to clarify the scenario where we move. In Spain there are 17
Autonomies plus two independent cities (Ceuta and Melilla). Each of them has a
112 PSAP and, as I say, the emergency number here is the same for all Europe:
112. Besides Canarias, Catalonia also has its own emergency app, gencat, and
Madrid (the capital city) is already working in one.
On the other hand, there are intuitions, like the European Emergecy Number Association, EENA,
and projects funded by the European Commission, like Alert4All, which
is at the last mile of a public alert
system proof-of-concept implementation and will conclude in October 15 with the
demonstration of its most remarkable features in an operational context, working
very hard to have a common protocol capable of communicating an emergency everywhere
in Europe, not to mention the Community Mechanism for Civil Protection , whose
main role is to facilitate co-operation in civil protection assistance
interventions in the event of major emergencies which may require urgent
response actions anywhere inside or outside the European Union.
If we have the tools and are capable of working so well when
countries are put together in an international disaster, to me it is a bit
difficult to understand why we don’t unify
apps, numbers and procedures. Sure Spain is not the
only one to have this scenario but a sample.
If the objective is to make things simpler for the
affected citizens, the stakeholders and the emergency services. Shouldn't we
all go in the same direction?
