Vonage Puts VoIP 911 Caller on Hold

kamikaze-Tech writes "It is being reported on the Vonage Forums that last month when Loren Veltkamp's Chanhassen, Minnesota home caught on fire, he immediately called 9-1-1 using Vonage. Unfortunately, Vonage put him on hold, causing a delay in the response from emergency workers. By the time fire crews arrived, the fire had become a five-alarm blaze. The house was a total loss."

Comments

Dupe "Article"

[TheComputerMutt.ca]

This "article" is a duplicate thread on the Vonage Forum. The original thread has much more information.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

If the poster had read a bit further, he would have found out This isn't a new story (same link as parent, but I had written this in notepad while wating for the story to come out of the mysterious future) AND the guy involved was a bit of an idiot who wouldn't know a five alarm fire from a small fire he could rescue a computer from. He probably caused more delay in the attempt to rescue his house by leading the police on a chase from front door, through kitchen, to basement and out a window than the delay caused by Vonage National 911 putting him on hold.

Anybody who only has Vonage without some form of backup line (either a bare bones land line or a cell phone) is a bit of a moron anyway- what would he have done if a candle lit the drapes on fire during a power outage?

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[HardCase]

Both look about the same to me:

A communication error occurred: "Operation timed out"
The Web Server may be down, too busy, or experiencing other problems preventing it from responding to requests. You may wish to try again at a later time.

Re:Dupe "Article"

[Bushcat]

Not only does the original thread (http://www.vonage-forum.com/ftopic11631.html) have more information, as you say, but the originator later makes the telling comment "Got the story off of a news channel 5 website....So they can make things out to be a little more dramatic than it actually is...."

On the one hand the house "burnt down", on the other hand the owner could wander around it rescuing his computer, etc.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Slashdoted already? That was quick.

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[eln]

I agree. I use only cell phones for day to day calling, but I still have a basic land line hooked up, and a cheap $10 phone that doesn't require power in the closet in case of emergencies. I've had plenty of times during storms where the power went out and the phone lines still worked.

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[geekoid]

Actually, it is common for someone to be in a fire, and underestimate the danger becasue some of the chemicals in the air make it so you can not smell the smoke.

When my mothers house caught on fire, She was sure she was fine to go back in, went in to get her keys so she could moce her car, coming back out they dragged her away. SHe kept saying it wasn't a big deal.

They dashboard in her car was melting.

My mother is not a moron. SHe's gt problems, but she is smart.
My point is, don't judge this guy based on this incident, many people feel they are 'safe enough' in a fire, when they are not.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

My point was that a true five-alarmer would generate so much excess heat that NOBODY would have been able to enter the house. Let alone TWICE (first to get his computer, second to lead the police on a stupid chase). There's something that stinks about this story- and being put on hold by "Vonage" is the least of it.

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[1u3hr]

Actually, they all seem to be quoting from this news article. There is alaso a video of the fire. (Why do people submit forum posts referring to blogs recapping usenet posts quoting from an article, instead of just going back to the original link?)

The most important question, "HOW LONG WAS THE DELAY?" is not answered anywhere I can see.

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[dirty]

Verizon will sell you a dial tone only plan that will get 911 for something like $5 + taxes, fees, and all that other fun stuff.

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[blaksaga]

> what would he have done if a candle lit the drapes on fire during a power outage?

The same thing people did before EVERYBODY had a telephone: run to the neighbors. :)

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[zippthorne]

The phone companies (at least around here in FL) really know how to upsell you. In fact, if you don't know what you want, you'll easily end up with a $30/mon. plan before the "taxes, fees, tax fees, fee taxes, and fee fees" are taken care of. I put that in quotes becuase I've actually called the phone company and asked what each of the items is for, and not one of them is an actual levy the government will ever recieve. Pretty much the entire cost-of-doing-business seems to be accounted for in the "fees."

Lesser plans are available for people that aren't interested in "unlimited" local calling, caller ID, call waiting, voicemail, etc. but you have to ask more than once because the data entry monkeys will make assumptions...

And more importantly, never utter the word, "yes" to a phone company employee for any reason ever or you will see your bill creep.

Following these simple rules I was able to reduce the cost of my landline, which I used only to recieve calls from the phone company regarding increasing service plans and a representative of the Florida State Troopas begging for money that probably never reaches any actual officers, to $9.95, which was only $25 a month after all the "fees."

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[mpe]

Actually, it is common for someone to be in a fire, and underestimate the danger becasue some of the chemicals in the air make it so you can not smell the smoke.

In many fires smoke poisoning is the biggest contributor to death and injury.

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[nharmon]

Except taxes & fees can be $15-$20.

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[melandy]

The term "X alarm fire" is used to describe how serious a fire is. X refers to the number of fire stations that respond to the fire. So in the story, unless 5 fire stations responded to this blaze, someone is talking out of his arse.

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[W2IRT]

The term "X alarm fire" is used to describe how serious a fire is. X refers to the number of fire stations that respond to the fire. So in the story, unless 5 fire stations responded to this blaze, someone is talking out of his arse.

Actually an alarm level isn't necessarily the number of stations involved, although that's a local definition for the most part. Urban and rural definitions can vary in terminology.

In many areas, especially cities and towns, one alarm level would typically bring 3 engines, 2 ladders a chief and a rescue or something similar. Probably at least 2 & 2 plus a chief. If they roll up and see a building fully involved (heavy volume of fire), the senior officer would likely bang out a second alarm on arrival and bring in another set of apparatus similar to the first (another 3&2, officer, etc). In a city, a 5-5 is a seriously major fire; 15 to 20 engine companies, 8-10 ladder trucks, air supply units, mask service units, a bevy of chiefs and officers, probably a canteen and a handful of special-use units. In a rural setting, probably water supply units and relay pumpers if the building involved ins't near a hydrant network, mutual aid from nearby towns, etc.

For a house fire, I would be surprised to see anything more than a second or third alarm unless there were kids trapped, hazmat materials in the shed and a team of strippers running the canteen. My guess is that probably there were five pieces of apparatus* on-scene and that became a Five Alarm job by some idiot reporter not familiar with the terminology.

*The term "apparatus" is used on this side of the Atlantic to describe a fire department vehicle of some kind or another (pumper, aerial ladder, tower ladder, quint, rescue squad, etc). In the UK, they use the term appliance. The first time I heard London Fire Brigade radio traffic requesting three more appliances on a job, I swear I was prepared in my mind to hear the dispatcher reply "Sending two toasters and a blender to your location, K."

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[ShibaInu]

Regardless of this guy's competence, no 911 call should EVER be put on hold. At least not until you are talking to an actual 911 dispatcher. This is a legit issue for all VOIP providers, since they are supposedly competing for our phone service.

Now, it is not smart to only have a VOIP phone. It is relatively cheap to have even an old cell phone as backup, since even a cell phone with no calling plan can reach 911.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

Regardless of this guy's competence, no 911 call should EVER be put on hold. At least not until you are talking to an actual 911 dispatcher. This is a legit issue for all VOIP providers, since they are supposedly competing for our phone service.

Actually, it's not a problem with VOIP providers at all- it's a problem with overworked and understaffed 911 call centers around the country. I've been put on hold without talking to a dispatcher even in Beaverton, OR on a land line.

Now, it is not smart to only have a VOIP phone. It is relatively cheap to have even an old cell phone as backup, since even a cell phone with no calling plan can reach 911.

True enough.

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[Anml4ixoye]

For a house fire, I would be surprised to see anything more than a second or third alarm unless there were kids trapped, hazmat materials in the shed and a team of strippers running the canteen.

Having been on a 4-alarm house fire, I can say that it is indeed very rare. The house in question was around 12,000 square feet, had poor water access, and caused more loss in that single fire then in all the house fires in the entire county combined for the entire year.

I have been on my share of 2 and 3 alarm house fires, but those number were either caused by lack of water or because it gets really hot in Florida in the summer. ;)

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[Stephen Samuel]

On the one hand the house "burnt down",

Have you ever seen a house burn down after the residents called 911 on a ground line (as in, before VOIP was even available)?

I thougt so.

Blaming vonage for the fact that they guy was too stupid to just sit back and wait for the firefighters to extinguish the blaze before going in to recover his hard drive seems a bit excessive.

I'd still recommend a basic ground line for emergencies, but I'd be slow to put full blame on vonage.

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[Marxist Hacker 42]

What kicks it up so much? When I moved in, I had BDTS- the phone bill hadn't been paid in three years, and the phone had simply gone down to that level of service with nobody paying the bill. It was able to dial two numbers- 911 and 0. Of course, if you dialed 0, you got an operator trying to sell you local phone service.

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[Cryssen]

Or you can use any old cell phone, wether it has a plan or not to call 911, by law any carrier in the area has to pick up the call and put it through.

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[luhar]

This is why I love slashdot... who'd have thought I'd learn this today!

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[Ironsides]

Or you can use any old cell phone, wether it has a plan or not to call 911, by law any carrier in the area has to pick up the call and put it through.

1) Cell phones don't always have signal.
2) Cell phones don't always give the exact location of where you are.
3) When the power goes out, cell phone towers have a limited battery/generator backup.
4) Cell Phone batteries will run down, landlines run off the phone company.
5) You're nuts if you think every cell phone company can pick up the other's signals. They operate on different frequencies and are not going to go out of their way to pick up the frequencies of a cell phone they don't support.

Nothing to see here

[michaelhood]

This is no different than the 911 service on PSTN (regular phone service).

I've been put on hold at least 50-60% of the time I've called.

They're understaffed.

Re:Nothing to see here

[mtenhagen]

And how many times did you call? 2 times and you where put on hold 50%-60%?

Or did you make enough calls to 911 to make it statiscly relevant? If so you where put on hold while they send out the police to arrest you!

Re:Nothing to see here

[pjellis]

If Vonage 911 is anything like the standard phone service 911 then its a combination of not enough staff and an extremely high volume of non-emergency calls.

If I remember correctly, the percent of calls to 911 that are actual emergency calls is below 5%.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Phurd Phlegm]

I've been put on hold at least 50-60% of the time I've called.

Were you first asked "is this an emergency?" That used to be the standard when I was involved in fielding emergency calls. If you said "yes," then you weren't put on hold.

A large number of calls to the usual 911 call center are probably non-emergency (barking dogs, illegal parking, etc.).

If the answer is "hell, no," then what area are you calling from? I call 911 a few times a year (usually to report a stalled car on the freeway) and I've never been put on hold.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Were you first asked "is this an emergency?" That used to be the standard when I was involved in fielding emergency calls. If you said "yes," then you weren't put on hold.

I had to call a couple of weeks ago about a suspected (and thankfully non-existant) chimney fire (turned out to be a piece of newspaper went up the flue and got caught in the spark trap at the top of the chimney- made for a nice bit of harmless fireworks spotted by a passing car, who notified me). I was put on hold without anybody asking anything- by the time I was off hold, they sent out the fire department anyway though I said the flames were out...

Re:Nothing to see here

[DrSkwid]

"a stalled car on the freeway"

You should have phoned Team America : World Police for that

911 is for when the tv breaks down or there are some squirrels fighting on your lawn

Re:Nothing to see here

[sqlrob]

If it's in a lane on a freeway, that's the proper action, it could very easily turn into an emergency

Re:Nothing to see here

[Xugumad]

Do you know how they defined emergency?

For example, is calling to report that the fire alarm is going off in a university building, which turns out to be a faulty alarm, an emergency because it requires an immediate response, or a non-emergency because it wasn't actually a fire, and the alarm system had auto-reported it anyway?

Same question for something being reported more than once - for example, a nearby house caught fire recently, and we called to report it, to find out that (not unsuprisingly, given the size of the fire when we spotted it), that several other people had called already?

Re:Nothing to see here

[westlake]

This is no different than the 911 service on PSTN (regular phone service).

I have never been put on hold by 911 and this is a number I have had to dial more often than I care to think about. Chronic illness in the family. Fire and accidents.

Re:Nothing to see here

[sirket]

Perhaps you missed the news about the minivan on the NY Thruway which was smashed to little pieces after stopping in the right lane of traffic. 4 people were killed and 2 critically injured after they were rear-ended by a tractor trailer traveling at 65 MPH.

Now perhaps you would like to reconsider your asinine comment.

-sirket

Re:Nothing to see here

[pvt_medic]

Understaffed? oh you dont even know the half of it. I was on a dept up in VT and the dispatching agency that also handled our 911 calls staffed one dispatcher per shift. They handled 18 different agencies, and answered 911 calls for 8 towns.

Re:Nothing to see here

[hotdiggitydawg]

Of course you were put on hold - you dialed 911. The real number is 912 - every Stonecutter knows that!

Re:Nothing to see here

[Pharmboy]

Do you know how they defined emergency?

The imminent loss of life, limb or property. Or at least that is the standard in most locales. Breaking your wrist isn't an "emergency". Cutting it with a razorblade is.

The problem is they should ENFORCE fines for "obvious" misuse, such as calls for barking dogs, etc. No fines for borderline cases (ie: when there is an injury, extremely loud sound that could have been explosion, smell of gas, etc.) but for the very obvious.

At least $200 for a first time offense and going up another $200 for each subsequent non-emergency calls in a 3 year period. There are already enough laws on the books to cover this. The problem is that it is not enforced.

Same for people who don't pull over when an ambulance/firetruck is trying to get by, except considerably higher fines ($500 for the first offense that is without an affirmative defense). Not so ironic, people are usually quick to pull over to make room for the police...

Re:Nothing to see here

[PakProtector]

I've got an emergency for you. I live three blocks from the University of Flordia, and I work across the street from it at a Pizza Place. One night I was walking home after work. I heard what sounded like a pellet rifle go off, and looked around, and from a large orange and blue apartment building, a two girls were on a balcony with what I assumed was a Pellet Rifle. I kept on walking.

About five seconds later I heard something whiz close enough by my right ear for it to disturb my hair. I ran for cover behind a large pile of dirt and the bulldozer that moved it at the apartment complex accross from said Orange and Blue building that was being renovated, and called 911, telling them I had just been shot at. I also stated thought it was not a firearm, but a BB Gun. About 40 seconds later two police cars pulled up, officers got out, guns drawn, wearing flakk jackets, and proceeded to find the correct apartment and break in. Turns out it was two girls and their boyfriends who bought airrifles at Wal-Mart and got drunk at started shooting them.

They had been shooting at a stop sign (which an officer and I noted was riddled with pot-marks), and claimed that it was an accident they had come so close. However, I was a good fifty feet away from that stop sign when I was shot at, and I didn't hear a ricochet, and anyway, the angle was all wrong for it to be ricochet.

While I decided not to press charges, I think the Police responded very well to what could have been Attempted Murder.

Re:Nothing to see here

[woolio]

I've been put on hold at least 50-60% of the time I've called.

I'm not sure which is more disturbing -- that you were put on hold or that you have called enough times to be able to establish these percentages...

Re:Nothing to see here

[_iris]

They usually put you on hold while they trace the call. They are understaffed to handle the number of illegitimate calls they receive.

Re:Nothing to see here

[mkettler]

Well, it looks like /. is definitely now working to reduce those numbers further...

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=181150&cid=149 84537

That said, the 5% reale-emergency statistic seems awfully low. However, I'm sure 911 does get a lot of general "I need the police because my car was stolen" type calls.

In some municipalities there is NO other number other than 911 to reach police at. Case in point, baltimore, prior to implementing 311 as a non-emergency number:
http://www.911dispatch.com/info/311_page.html

However, even the above website, reporting on a city which had NO other way to reach police (not even an ordinary telephone number!) there was still only 60% non-emergency call volume.

Part of me wonders if there's a discrepancy here because of a third category.. "dropped call"...

A breakdown like this might not be too unrealistic in some areas:

5% answered, emergency
35% unanswered due to overloaded lines
60% answered, non-emergency

However, I'd be a little surprised if any area had 5% of it's answered calls as emergencies and 95% of the answered calls being non-emergency.. That's kind of crazy high.

Now I do see one reference that says "depending on time and locality, from 20 to 95 percent of calls to 911 are nonemergency calls".. However, that's also "depending on time"...

I can certainly see there being some random days that it gets as high as 95%... But not a sustained average of 95%...

http://changela.com/oped_311.htm

Re:Nothing to see here

[Sarisar]

Well considering my local Police Force (in the UK) is the Avon and Somerset Constabulary and they actually have some of the crap 999 calls on there website here

With such wonders as "A female caller has dialled 999 to request help in finding her spectacles." You can listen to the actual recordings (with subtitles if you want as some have a lot of background noise).

This is probably why they are going to introduce another number when it is not 'life threatening".

Re:Nothing to see here

[Pharmboy]

The real number is 912 - every Stonecutter knows that!

Who controls the British crown?
Who keeps the metric system down?
We do! We do.

Who leaves the Atlantis off the maps?
Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
We do! We do.

Who holds back the electric car?
Who makes Steve Guttenberg a star?
We do! We do.

Who robs cave fish of their sight?
Who rigs every Oscar night?
We do! We do.

(appologies to http://www.snpp.com/episodes/2F09.html)

Re:Nothing to see here

[ad0gg]

At least you got to talk to someone. I called 911 on my cell phone because i hit a dining room table(LA freeways have weirdest stuff that i assume falls off the back of pickup trucks) on the freeway and i got a voice mail system telling me to leave the details of emergency after the beep.

Re:Nothing to see here

[technothrasher]

Or did you make enough calls to 911 to make it statiscly relevant? If so you where put on hold while they send out the police to arrest you!

Well, I don't know the original posters situation but I used to live by a dangerous intersection and called 911 at least once every couple weeks or so to report yet another accident in front of my house. So you can actually have a situation where you make a lot of 911 calls and still not be abusing the system.

BTW, I was never put on hold.

Re:Nothing to see here

[0xA]

Okay well here's an example. A while ago I called 911 because there was some moron driving around my very dense urban neighborhood in a Western Star truck (big ass tractor trailer). He was quite obviously giving his two buddies a tour around the place as he was screwing around with the horn and going in circles. There were several places in the area that he couldn't get the damn truck through and he came nose to nose with me in my g/f's Civic after turning a corner and barely stopped, he was within a foot. There was no way to pass as there were cars parked on both sides of the street, I probably couldn't have walked between the truck and the parked cars. I had to back all the way down the street. I called 911, as I know damn well that the guy was just screwing around and he was endangering both lives and property. I was chastised by the 911 operator for calling when it wasn't a "real" emergency. Realistically it was only a matter of time before the guy took out something or some person (it ended up being a parking sign). Maybe I didn't make my case well enough or something but just because someone isn't hurt now doesn't mean that there isn't a situation that could develop that way. 911 services shouldn't be exclusively reactive.

Re:Nothing to see here

[ocbwilg]

All of the E911 call centers that I have seen automatically pull the phone number and address when the call comes in. There's no need to trace anything (or manually initiate a trace).

Re:Nothing to see here

[Richard]

The problem is they should ENFORCE fines for "obvious" misuse, such as calls for barking dogs, etc. No fines for borderline cases (ie: when there is an injury, extremely loud sound that could have been explosion, smell of gas, etc.) but for the very obvious.

In my city, Atlanta, GA, USA, 911 is in fact what you use for things like barking dogs, etc. If you try and call the police department to, say, report a busted car window and a stolen cell phone, they will tell you to hang up and call 911. It's kind of annoying.

Re:Nothing to see here

[v1]

Not certain on this, but I've heard that once you call 911, they have to send somebody out to your house. Police, fire department, someone. This is particularly true for calls to the police department that suddenly change their mind and say there is no need to send police. (spoken under duress)

Imagine the lawsuit that would result if you were told at gunpoint to tell the operator to nevermind and they failed to send out the cops?

Re:Nothing to see here

[Baricom]

I don't live in Atlanta, and yet we have the same procedure here. I actually don't mind all that much because it's not taking operators away from handling emergency calls. The first thing you're asked after Police, Fire or Ambulance is whether you're calling to report an emergency. If you say no, they transfer you to the non-emergency call center, which has a different (smaller?) pool of operators.

Calling the police for non-emergencies using 911 is actually encouraged by the police chief, and since my cell phone company is picking up the airtime, I'm only too happy to oblige.

Re:Nothing to see here

[rob1980]

Not really disturbing - I worked at ADT for a couple months awhile back and I could have established these kinds of percentages easily within a week if I was taking notes. And it wouldn't be for one city, it would have been across the entire nation. I think the longest I was ever on hold was 15 minutes for the LAPD.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Jason Earl]

No, the 911 operator was right. What you needed to do was call the police. 911 is not the police.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Sandor at the Zoo]

I'm right with you on this one.

I once called 911 because there was a power line on the ground, slowly writhing, throwing sparks, starting a little smoke in some wet leaves. The 911 operator said I should call the power company because this wasn't an emergency. I said "you want me to wait until a little kid gets electrocuted?" She grumbled and called the power company herself. And the police -- a cop came and made sure nobody got killed while the power guys were coming.

Jeez.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Andrew Kismet]

Bloody genetic elitists. Remember, memetics is just as important as genetics.

Re:Nothing to see here

[avdp]

911 is the right way to call the police, when there is an emergency. Emergencies don't neccessarily have to involve fires or physical injuries. The 911 center will dispatch police, fire and ambulance as needed. Most police departments also have non-emergency numbers (not neccessarily staffed 24 hours) for the mundane stuff. In my town it is the same people that answer the 911 call, but I guess it allows them to prioritize the calls.

Re:Nothing to see here

[The Snowman]

Several times I've had a car stall on the highway (my old '86 Ford did not have a functioning gas gauge, and sometimes I guessed wrong on how much I had left). Every single time I was able to coast off to the shoulder. A car stopped in the middle of the highway, even one of the side lanes, is an emergency. That fact that the driver couldn't turn the wheel and coast to the shoulder tells me there is a serious problem. Yes, a stupid driver is a serious problem in this case because it's just begging for an accident.

I almost got involved in what could have been a VERY large accident. Some old guy was driving 25 fucking miles per hour in the right-hand lane. I barreled up at 60 MPH, got in the right lane for my exit, and slammed on the brakes. I couldn't see a damn thing since the road turned and came down a hill at this precise location. Turns out he had quite a line of cars behind him. Stopped? No. Emergency? Potentially. If he hadn't been getting off the highway I would have called 911 from my cell phone. In the middle of a city on a 5 lane highway with moderate traffic this could have turned into a 40 car pileup VERY easily.

Re:Nothing to see here

[iamacat]

Have you ever actually heard of anyone criticized for calling 911 with a broken wrist? If you don't have anyone to take you to the hospital, you could develop shock, hypothermia, blood clots...

Re:Nothing to see here

[abscissa]

Actually the correct 911 definition of an "emergency" is:

1. Crime in progress or
2. Life or death situation

Re:Nothing to see here

[xrobertcmx]

Lucky you, the three times I have ever had to dial it, twice after seeing major accidents, have all resulted in a busy signal and not being able to get through.

Re:Nothing to see here

[dacarr]

Understandable, but only if you call 911 from a cellphone.

Re:Nothing to see here

[blincoln]

It's not an asinine comment. A stopped car in the right lane isn't an emergency. They need to get their asses out of the car or move the car to the shoulder.

In the areas of the US I'm familiar with, it's actually illegal to leave your car when it's on the freeway, because you will probably be run down. This is why people whose cars break down leave them stopped where they are and call 911.

Re:Nothing to see here

[mrchaotica]

Maybe some police departments have non-emergency numbers, but not all. For example, I've called the police via the non-emergency (7-digit) number in the phone book, only to be told that in order to report anything or reach a dispatcher I needed to call 911 instead. It's incredibly stupid.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Original Replica]

I live in New York City, we have a 311 service for everything nonemergency you need to notify the city about. It has only been around for a few years but given it's success I'm suprised most munipalities haven't implemented the same service.

Re:Nothing to see here

[kwark]

But the whole point is that one only needs to remember 1 number at anytime and anyplace for any /emergency/ (that 1 number being 911 or 999 or 112 or whatever).

If you have the time to lookup the local number it's certainly not an emergency but having to find those numbers can offcourse be a PITA. That's why eg in the Netherlands there is 1 emergency number and 1 number to get the local police department (no such number for firedepartments! etc.). I guess it was implementent to improve response time/rate.

Re:Nothing to see here

[jridley]

Actually the police in our area want people to call 911 for anything that might potentially be dangerous. That includes debris in the road, drunks causing trouble, etc. For the most part, if it's something if you want the cops or fire department to show up for, you dial 911.

In many rural areas, the police stations are not all manned 24 hours. 911 is routed to an on-duty dispatch officer, for the nearest station which is manned at that time. If you pick a police number and call that after hours, you may or may not get anyone. 911 will always get answered.

They visit the schools and scout meetings, and they tell the kids to dial 911 if they are scared, but remember that once they dial that number, a policeman WILL show up, they're required to roll a unit for every 911 call, so don't play around.

Re:Nothing to see here

[matth]

Yeah.. uhh 911 is for emergencies... and the NON-Emergency number at the 911 communications center is for erm.. well non-emergencies such as this.

Re:Nothing to see here

[the_bard17]

Outside SUNY Albany last year, I stopped to help some guys standing on the side of the road. Their four door sedan (fairly new and rather expensive looking) was sitting in the right lane (not the breakdown lane). In other words, their car was blocking traffic. When I got closer, I realized they had lost a tie rod on their right front, causing the wheel to turn perpendicular to the vehicle's motion, and forcing the axle to pop out. With front wheel drive, this effectively arrested their forward motion, and there was absolutely no way it could move under its own power to the shoulder of the road. They had their hazard lights on (and blinking), but if the traffic wasn't paying attention, someone would end up swerving to switch lanes very quickly. Several cars did exactly that during the ten minutes we waited until police arrived.

Or you can go a couple years farther back... I got out of work rather late (11PM), and turned onto the four lane road on my way home. It was your typical dark, rainy night. I accelerated up to 55 mph, and happened to notice a very strange, stationary light sitting in the middle of the left lane. I couldn't make it ought very well, but appeared to be a fairly dim flashlight bulb. I erred on the side of caution, and moved over to the right lane. Just after I passed the light, I could make out a sizeable bulk behind it (keep in mind, it's extremely dark, no street lights, and it's raining). I started kicking up what I first thought was gravel at the same time... then realized it was debris. That bulk was a black car, and I was running over bits of plastic/glass/metal debris.

A few hundred feet forward was a rig pulling a trailer, parked on the side of the road. I stop, and the driver comes running back to me, saying he couldn't see them as he approached, swerved at the last second, and clipped their right rear, apparently spinning the car around and into the center guard rail, bouncing it back out into the left lane. He had already called 911 on his cell phone, so we both ran back to the car to check on everyone. The previous occupants (one male, one female) must've been fairly shocked & slightly out of their minds, because they were busy picking up debris from the middle of the road.

That light that I had first noticed had gone out by that time... if it had gone out before that, I would've slammed into it square on, doing about 55 mph. I was driving a Saturn sedan at the time. Even if I managed to come out of the collision fairly well, I'm sure that the occupants of the other car would not have... they had been standing the behind the car as I approached, and would probably have pushed the car over them after I collided. That qualifies as an emergency to me ;o).

Re:Nothing to see here

[jsight]

Indeed, that practice is surprisingly common.

Re:Nothing to see here

[hawk]

I've called 911 more times than I'd like to admit, but I will anwayy

1988 or so, San Diego: "A car just flipped, spun 720 degrees, bouncing off the concrete barrier 3 times."
"Was anyone hurt?"

1990, Las Vegas: The dumpster behind my office is on fire!
"Where are you?"
"It doesn't show on your systems?"
"No,not here."

2002 or so, Pennsylvania: child drank "yucky water." handled reasonably.

Last year, Pennsylvania: barely & pre-teens camping in the yard, some moron terrorizing them. Well handled.

Last week: one of my students, in a contest to see who could jump the fartherest from the swing . . .

And there are a couyple more that don't come right to mind.

I've never been put on hold, though . . .

hawk

Re:Nothing to see here

[dextromulous]

If you said "yes," then you weren't put on hold.

Not everyone lives in areas with such luxury. In rural Saskatchewan if you see a large fire in a field and you phone 911, you will not be put on hold; they will hang up on you and call you back a few (I've seen up to 5 but heard of more) minutes later. Of course, this is because they just call the fire phone and get the fire department to phone you directly. Still, the 911 operator does not take your information or even any details about the fire (including the location!) And why is this you ask? Because they're understaffed and only have a few people taking 911 calls directly.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Pharmboy]

The imminent loss of life, limb is the legal term used in many states, not just a random phrase I invented.

Sending SPAM is a crime in the US, but you don't use 911 to report it. Same with seeing your neighbor smoke a joint. Or hit and run on an unoccupied, parked car. You call the desk, not 911.

There is a *reason* why the above is the worded the way it is. Not all crimes are emergencies or should be treated as such.

Re:Nothing to see here

[xx_toran_xx]

73% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Detritus]

I've owned pellet guns that could kill or seriously wound small game. A lucky shot could cause serious injury or death to a human. They are not toys.

Re:Nothing to see here

[operagost]

Murder? That would be a very lucky shot with a BB gun, indeed.

Re:Nothing to see here

[MrPiquul]

No, mod.... it's not fucking funny.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Kandei-chan]

Breaking your wrist isn't an "emergency". Cutting it with a razorblade is.

Not so. A medical emergency does not have to be immediately life-threatening. When someone not getting medical attention promptly is a risk to their life, limb, long-term health OR long-term quality of life, it's legally a medical emergency. If you break your wrist and don't have it set right away, it might impair the wrist's function. Even a "cosmetic" issue can be emergent - if you tear up your face in an accident, you may not be at risk of death, but you need a dermatological surgeon right away or your face might scar badly.

Same for people who don't pull over when an ambulance/firetruck is trying to get by, except considerably higher fines ($500 for the first offense that is without an affirmative defense).

That I'll agree with. I'd love to see an ambulance with a cowcatcher.

Re:Nothing to see here

[ahodgson]

I tried to call the police on something other than a 911 line. I got told by a voicemail system to "call back during business hours". I could not get a human on the line.

I was trying to report some asshat who just tried to sell me a home theatre system, from the side of a van, while stuck in rush-hour traffic. It's not exactly an emergency, but it is time-sensitive. So I didn't call and the thief is undoubtedly still out there ripping people off.

Re:Nothing to see here

[noidentity]

"Or did you make enough calls to 911 to make it statiscly relevant?"

Wait a minute, you're not supposed to call that number nine-hundred eleven times? Oh well, at least I got the "on-hold" percentage down to 1/10 of one percent accuracy! (53.7%)

Re:Nothing to see here

[lastchance_000]

You could put your eye out with that, kid!

Re:Nothing to see here

[jone1941]

50% of the time it works every time.

Re:Nothing to see here

[RickPartin]

I was just about to leave a comment saying how a number like this should exist.

Re:Nothing to see here

[innocent_white_lamb]

I've never been put on hold, though
 
I was, once. I called to report a burglary in progress at the restaurant across the street from me. And got to listen to "Your call is important to us. Please stay on the line..." for a few minutes before I could talk to anyone.
 
I put in an official complaint about that to our City Council, afterward.

Re:Nothing to see here

[innocent_white_lamb]

Depends on your situation. I own a business that is open downtown late-at-night. (A movie theatre.)
 
I get my share of odd occurrences here after all of the other downtown businesses are closed. A parked car caught fire a while back, I had a little girl of about 7 run in the door one night in her nightgown and bare feet, "Mommy's boyfriend is hitting her and she told me to run here and tell you."
 
An old lady sat down on the bench in front of my theatre a while back and appeared to have lost her mind.
 
Drunks, traffic accidents, burglar alarms, you-name-it. I see it here, and call 911 on a fairly regular basis.
 
And I live in a small town of 5000 people.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Silentnite]

You should know of course that....let's see, about 72 point...er.. lets say about 9. Yeah. 72.9% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

Re:Nothing to see here

[CortoMaltese]

Or did you make enough calls to 911 to make it statiscly relevant? If so you where put on hold while they send out the police to arrest you!

This reminds me... My brother was working on mobile phones some years back. One part of field testing was to call 911 a certain number of times. "Hello, this is so-and-so from big-mobile-phone-company. I'm performing field testing, and will be calling you 49 more times this afternoon. Please don't get upset."

Re:Nothing to see here

[avdp]

Yes, I was just disputing the parent's claim that 911 is not to be used to call the police. That is a ridiculous assertion (to say the least). If you need to call the police for anything other than let's say get a new parking sticker, 911 is what you dial. If you need immediate action (such as in this case) from the police, then it's an emergency. Maybe not a life threatening emergency, but still an emergency.

Re:Nothing to see here

[RedOregon]

Long long time ago when I was a kid, I had a Crosman pellet gun (not a BB gun, RTFP) that had the power of a .22 rifle when pumped 10 times (and you could pump it much more than that). That thing would put a BB right thru a 1/4" sheet of plywood. You better believe it could kill you with a head shot. Hell, rip an eye out and the shock alone could take you out.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Eivind]

It takes some judgement. The imminent loss of property may be an emergency if the property you're talking of is your house or your car. It ain't an emergency if you're in imminent danger of losing a penny.

A more normal definition is imminent risk of serious harm. There are things that are not loss of life, property or limb, but are nevertheless without a doubt emergencies. If someone is trying to rape you it's damn well an emergency, *even* if it's clear you'll lose neither limb nor life. (yeah, I know, it often isn't)

Re:Nothing to see here

[Maximum Prophet]

Ditto on the ambulance non-pullover fines.

But, I'd rather someone would lived alone call 911 for a broken wrist rather than try to drive to the hospital in an impaired state. I guess emergency is sort of like porn, can't define it, but you know it when you see it.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Cro Magnon]

There was a brief period when I had to call 911 fairly often. My neighbor had a had habit of beating up his GF. I called a number of times, and the dispatcher probably recognized my voice. Finally, she either left him or got beaten to death. I'm not sure which, but I haven't seen her in a long time.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Machina Fortuno]

You should make Twisted Metal cool again!

Re:Nothing to see here

[Machina Fortuno]

I agree... Emergency isn't because some idiot's dog is barking and you can't sleep. (sarcasm) You might drive to work in the morning tired and ram a convoy with the ambassador from Nigeria! Dogs barking are an emergency! (/sarcasm) And yeah... I think it depends who you get on dispatch. Personally... anytime that someone's person or property is directly in danger, I would call the cops. - And about the guy with the idiot trucker... The reason they probably didn't care is because by they figured that by the time they get there, they are stuck with an empty neighborhood and a trucker who moved on to something much more interesting.

Re:Nothing to see here

[jrmcferren]

"Hello, I would like to report a burned out street light..." I'm serious, 311 is the number to call for burned out street light bulbs.

Re:Nothing to see here

[f1055man]

15 minutes on hold for the LAPD, now that's great service. no, really. you're much safer without them.

Re:Nothing to see here

[saintlupus]

The problem is they should ENFORCE fines for "obvious" misuse, such as calls for barking dogs, etc.

A lot of towns don't put a non-emergency number for the police in the phone book any more. I don't think that helps the situation, when 911 is the ONLY way to call.

--saint

Re:Nothing to see here

[ColaMan]

Forget calling 911 anymore.
Here's the real number, it's :

wait, you *are* a stonecutter member, aren't you?

Re:Nothing to see here

[Phurd Phlegm]

Not really disturbing - I worked at ADT for a couple months awhile back and I could have established these kinds of percentages easily within a week if I was taking notes. And it wouldn't be for one city, it would have been across the entire nation.

Can you actually call 911 lines from across the nation from outside their coverage area, or did you just call some normal number? I suspect the only reasonable way to develop such statistics is to actually be in the coverage area making calls.

Re:Nothing to see here

[tgrigsby]

My boss tells an hysterical story about the time she was driving to work through a hilly area and passed a car that was trying to pull over as flames were shooting out from underneath it. As she drove on, she called 911 and something like the following transpired:

911: Dispatch, what's your emergency?

Boss: I just passed a car on Highway 50 that's on fire.

911: What color is the car?

Boss: (thought for a moment) Black. With flames. ...

Re:Nothing to see here

[martian265]

I worked at a bike shop right near the most dangerous intersection in town. During the 18 months that I worked there, there was not a single work day that went by that an accident did not happen directly in front of our store (we had running bets on what day would be our first non-accident day, no one ever collected). The person closest to the phone called 911 every time and we were never put on hold (although some days it did ring 7-10 times before someone picked up).

In case you're interested in the accidents, very few were cars getting rear ended. Our store was about a block away from the intersection and the heavy afternoon traffic was on our side of the street. The majority of the accidents involved someone using the left turn bay in front of us to make a U-turn into the heavy traffic. They would get hit by a car in one of the two most right lanes, usually due to gaps in traffic. The person doing the U-turn got the ticket every time of course.

Re:Nothing to see here

[doormat]

Heh, I was watching the news about 911 calls and one of the examples provided about BS calls was a lady who called 911 because the fast food restaraunt she was at refused to make the sandwich she ordered the way she wanted it.

I would have sent the police and had them arrest her for wasting valuable 911 time.

Re:Nothing to see here

[Chabo]

Yet another testament to Concealed Carry.

In a situation of this sort, the crime could have been stopped right then, instead of merely writing a letter to the city council the next day. If the criminals had intention to harm people, the police would not have been able to respond in time to prevent injury.

Re:Nothing to see here

[ivan256]

Many towns want you to call 911 instead of the police office number for anything that isn't bureaucratic. It wouldn't be very unusual for you to call the main number and have them tell you to hang up and call 911 if you're not looking for a specific officer or a copy of a police report. I'm not sure why, but I think it has something to do with the paperwork being semi-automated if calls are handled through the 911 system. In areas where this is the case, the first thing you will hear when you dial 911 is "Is this call regarding an emergency?" and if the answer is "No" then you almost certainly end up on hold.

Re:Nothing to see here

[PakProtector]

Murder? That would be a very lucky shot with a BB gun, indeed.

But I didn't know for sure that it was a BB Gun. And it wasn't a BB Gun. It was a Pellet Rifle, which is something different. I have been exposed to guns (Army Brat), and it could have been a silenced gun. It was loud, but not as loud as a full report, and in any event, I didn't stop to think about whether it was a BB Gun or not. All I thought was: I've just been shot at. Run.

Re:Nothing to see here

[rob1980]

Sorry for the late response - you more or less still go to the same place whether you're dialing 911 or a private dispatch number a local PD gave you. 911 is just a neat phone system hack that routes your call to the right dispatcher based on your location.

Why VoIP?

[networkBoy]

Was this his only phone?
Any reason he didn't have access to another phone?
Traditionally you exit your burning house ASAP and call from a house next door...
-nB

Re:Why VoIP?

[Donut2099]

Duh! If you read the article, you would see that his other phone was on fire.

Re:Why VoIP?

[Phurd Phlegm]

Was this his only phone?

Any reason he didn't have access to another phone?

Traditionally you exit your burning house ASAP and call from a house next door...

Here's the local TV station's report. They don't say so, but I assume that his only phone service was VOIP. As for running next door, I assume he figured it would be quicker to report if he played the percentages and didn't hang up to try again. According to the report, he was arrested for repeatedly reentering the house to save his computers.

Re:Why VoIP?

[networkBoy]

"According to the report, he was arrested for repeatedly reentering the house to save his computers"

And thus the cop should be shot for preventing a darwin award winner.
-nB

Re:Why VoIP?

[Bacon Bits]

Irrelevant. FCC regulations require service providers to connect any 911 emergency calls. That's why you can [supposedly] connect a phone to a jack with no service and dial 911, or use a cell phone that has no account and dial 911. It is Vonage's responsibility to see that this happens each time every time. There is no burden on the consumer for this one. If Vonage doesn't like it, they can choose not to be in the telcom business in the US.

Now, some of the reports I've read do say that Vonage connected him, but that the operators put him on hold. In that case, Vonage is not to blame as they met the requirments of law.

Re:Why VoIP?

[teasea]

So it's important to make sure your neighbor has a top line service.

It's all shits and giggles, folks.

Re:Why VoIP?

[westlake]

Traditionally you exit your burning house ASAP and call from a house next door...

"Next door" to my father's place is the farmhouse a mile down the road. "Next door" assumes you are in a condition to walk or drive. That your judgement is not impaired.

I have vivid memories still of my one and only experience with carbon monoxide poisoning.

Re:Why VoIP?

[Cl1mh4224rd]

According to the report, he was arrested for repeatedly reentering the house to save his computers.

Ahh... A true geek.

Re:Why VoIP?

[geekoid]

IT's not uncommon for people to do that. Even smart rational people have been know the think they still have time.

Re:Why VoIP?

[jpostel]

One of my biggest peaves with the whole VoIP 911 nonsense is that Vonage is simply trying to comply with the FCC regs, yet all (there are only a few left right?) the legacy telcos are spreading FUD about this like you don't see news stories about people calling 911 and getting disconnected or hung up on if they have Verizon. I have called 911 from a cell and had to be trasferred because the cell carrier needed to connect me with the State Police instead of the local cops nearest to the cell tower, or at least that's what the operator told me.

I don't see the VoIP 911 being any better or worse than cell phone 911.

Here is a pretty good article from BellSouth (ATT now?) with graphics that shows the basics of regular 911 vs cellular 911.

http://contact.bellsouth.com/email/bbs/phase2/how9 11works.html

Re:Why VoIP?

[frinkster]

Irrelevant. FCC regulations require service providers to connect any 911 emergency calls. That's why you can [supposedly] connect a phone to a jack with no service and dial 911, or use a cell phone that has no account and dial 911. It is Vonage's responsibility to see that this happens each time every time. There is no burden on the consumer for this one. If Vonage doesn't like it, they can choose not to be in the telcom business in the US.

I work in the cell phone infrastructure business. It's not really FCC regulations that make it so, it's a requirement of the various cell phone technologies.

A cell phone recognizes 911 (and the other emergency numbers used around the world) as an emergency call, picks the closest tower and requests an emergency call. It's a different process than making a normal call and bypasses nearly all of the steps involved with making a call (including such things as authentication, determining if you are allowed access, if you are roaming or local, if you should be billed, and a host of other steps). If there is no capacity, the base station will disconnect a paying call to make room. Whether you have a SIM card in the phone or even an active account is irrelevant to the whole process.

When we test new systems and major software upgrades, we attempt emergency calls first. Not really because we want to make sure they work, it's because it's a lot easier to set one up!

Re:Why VoIP?

[multipartmixed]

SOOOooooooooooo. If I change the "emergency number" setting in my cell to something else, can I make free calls? :)

Re:Why VoIP?

[kadathseeker]

Is Vonage without a normal line that common in the country? I would think that you'd be careful about the phones going dead when you are that far away and have some kind of backup whether or not you use VOIP, and if you do have it perhaps use VOIP mostly for lower usage rates. But hey, I'm a city/town kid.

Re:Why VoIP?

[LoRdTAW]

Sitting, as I am, in front of our class 5 telephone switch, I can tell you with absolute certainty that you cannot do this.


Maybe in your area but here in New York City It does work with Verizon. I tested this out on a dead second line in my home.

Re:Why VoIP?

[blincoln]

IT's not uncommon for people to do that. Even smart rational people have been know the think they still have time.

Yeah. It's easy to mock people for doing things that seem stupid, but most of the common "stupid" things that get people killed don't seem that way when it's you that's doing them.

Re:Why VoIP?

[jonwil]

The numbers are generally hard-wired into the phone and cant be changed.

Re:Why VoIP?

[mrchaotica]

No, a true geek would have backups... but would still be running back into the house anyway, to save his collection of autographed sci-fi memorabilia. ; )

Re:Why VoIP?

[dotdevin]

Not the case at all. There is no requirment that all POTS lines be live and able to dial 911. Try calling your phone company and disconnecting service and see if you can still dail 911...they physically disconnect your copper from the grid.

Re:Why VoIP?

[musiholic]

Landline 911 calling is not FCC either... it is a PUC requirement. And even then, the line can be completely shut-off - stringent requirements are placed upon the total shut-off of local phone service.

Re:Why VoIP?

[aztec rain god]

Obviously you missed the season premiere of The Sopranos.

Re:Why VoIP?

[assassinator42]

I'd imagine the tower would reject the "emergency call" if it weren't actually to 911.

Re:Why VoIP?

[magictiger]

The emergency numbers are handled system-side. What you have on the phone itself is a list of numbers that the handset can call if it is locked (dependant on handset) or outgoing calls are restricted. For most cell companies that I know of, both 611 and 911 are handled in this way. If you have a prepaid phone and it does work to the point that it tells you to dial 611 for assistance, chances are you are not going to talk to the right people. :)

Re:Why VoIP?

[dan the person]

I work in the cell phone infrastructure business. It's not really FCC regulations that make it so, it's a requirement of the various cell phone technologies.

I think you've got it back to front there.

Cell phone infrastructure is designed that way becase it is required by law to be designed that way.

Re:Why VoIP?

[juliao]

Sorry, you have it the other way around. The ONLY reason differentiated service for 911 exists in the protocol specifications is because FCC and other regulatory bodies across the world mandate that it be so. See http://www.fcc.gov/911/ for an example. Similar regulations exist across the world. Maybe it's before your time, but 911 systems were once the target of many exploits before the first crackdowns, mainly because its implementation had to obey strict rules that usually meant that 911 systems were a bit more exposed than other telco components. But that was then, and now is now - still, I would not be surprised if 911 services proved themselves to be a gateway for hacking into modern voip facilities...

Re:Why VoIP?

[aclarke]

Not only that, but have you ever called 911 and NOT been put on hold? I've called it a few times, and I can't remember ever just getting through. I think they usually attempt some sort of triage first, but I recall being left on hold for several minutes once when I witnessed a rather bad single car accident and called 911.

Re:Why VoIP?

[Valdrax]

No. Not in the slightest. The special "kick someone else" response for a tower is hardwired into either the tower hardware or the local switch office and not into your phone. The assurance that you won't be billed is handled by the individual company's billing appications because the call record still goes through.

I work on the billing system for a major cellular provider. 911 trunks go into a special numbers table used by the call rating program to make sure that a toll record is never generated for a 911 call and that the air record is zero-rated. We have had issues before where a 911 trunk was not in the special numbers table and customers were being charged for 911 calls. Bills were put on hold until that was fixed.

Re:Why VoIP?

[Dr. Manhattan]

I have vivid memories still of my one and only experience with carbon monoxide poisoning.

Wouldn't those be fuzzy memories? :->

that's just sad

[gforce811]

Is he entitled to a lawsuit or do you guys think their 911 disclaimer is enough to stop any charges?

Re:that's just sad

[anthony_dipierro]

I can't even get through to read the story. From the headlines, it seems like they might have been negligent, or they might not have. Just knowing that he was "put on hold" doesn't really tell you anything.

Anyway, disclaimers don't really mean that much if the employee handling the phone call wasn't following procedure.

Re:that's just sad

[DustyShadow]

Well, considering that police aren't even required to help you, I doubt 911 has any requirement to do so either.

Re:that's just sad

[JRock911]

Now I dialed 911 a long time ago
Don't you see how late they're reactin'
They only come and they come when they wanna
So get the morgue embalm the goner
They don't care 'cause they stay paid anyway
They teach ya like an ace they can't be betrayed
I know you stumble with no use people
If your life is on the line they you're dead today

"911 Is A Joke"
Public Enemy

Amazing

[ackthpt]

They claim to be associating establishing a physical location with each E911, at so many counties per week. Yet someone on the blog points out in Ohio they're moving at a snail's pace and only in 4 rural counties. Sounds like my office, let's process ~1,500 applications, which average about 30 minutes each, by one person, who is being phased out due to lack of work. It done be amazing.

"please click on 1 if you have just seen bigfoot, click on 2 if a wolf has lept through your living room window, click 3 if you believe CowboyNeal is lurking under your bed, click 4 if you laughed so hard at the last South Park that you are choking on a cheezy poof, click 5 if you are so offended by the last South Park you are choking on a cheezy poof, click 6 if you think The Lakers is a stupid name for a team that moved from Minnesota to Los Angeles where there are no lakes, click 7 if your house is on fire and your children have flown, click 8 if you are suffering a medical emergency, click 9 if you are "dying zerelda, dying zerelda, die, die, die, die, die, die!!!" or stay on the line and listen to some light jazz until your connection is mysteriously dropped."

Re:Amazing

[evil agent]

*click*

"You have selected regicide. If you know the king or queen being murdered, press 1."

Re:Amazing

[rossdee]

""please click on 1 if you have just seen bigfoot, "

Why do you need to call 911 if you have seen bigfoot. (Unless it is threatening your life, which is extremely rare). I would have thought your first action would be to contact you local TV station, and the National Enquirer so you can get your 15 minutes of fame...

happens on POTS as well

[Splork]

try calling 911 on a POTS line or cell phone in any major city and see for yourself.

Re:happens on POTS as well

[Jeian]

I've only had to call 911 three times in my life, I've never gotten put on hold.

Re:happens on POTS as well

[The Good Reverend]

try calling 911 on a POTS line or cell phone in any major city and see for yourself.

Or take someone the parent's word for it, as calling 911 in a non-emergency situation is illegal in most locations.

Re:happens on POTS as well

[Mattwolf7]

No, I don't think it is illegal anywhere. You can call 911 and ask to be put on hold until an operator is available and talk to the operator so you know what to do incase of an emergency situation. The operators do not mind this if you tell them right away this is not a emergency and you are trying to teach your child about 911 or something. It's only illegal if you are being an ass and faking calls...

Re:happens on POTS as well

[Anonymous Coward]

The correct procedure is to call the 911 supervisor and inform the supervisor you will be performing a 911 test. You may need to call your phone provider first to find the number or call 311 if it is available in your area. The number is typically something like nxx-x911. Make sure the supervisor can see your information and give the supervisor enough time to notify the operators. If you change POTS or PRI providers, you need to add 911 testing to your checklist. I forgot to do this once and learned my lesson. Fortunately, no harm came from it. The PRI provider did not setup the PRI to route to correct 911 call center. They had routed to the county call center instead of the city. For some reason, when a call goes to Travis County Emergency Center instead of the City of Austin, all information about who placed the call is stripped.

statistical

[mtenhagen]

Oh my god I cant write anymore. I must call someone ;-)

Vonage

[robpoe]

I'm a Vonage customer and couldn't be more happy.

I've never experienced a loss or major call quality, even when my ISP hits 250-350ms ping (as they sometimes do!).

Though, I've never call 911 from it .. and I think I'd use my cell for that...

Re:Vonage

[Firehed]

Hm. On the contrary, I'd probably be better off just making a run for the police station than trying to get good enough signal on my cell to make any call, let alone a 911. I'm somewhat tempted to set myself up with a vonage account, but I really have no need and I don't want to get a new phone (as I only have a handset, and the base station is on our POTS line) but it would nice for those odd situations. My room (where, as a geek, I spend most of my time) has the patchiest cell signal I've ever seen, anywhere from no signal to five bars (out of five), and I usually leave it on vibrate since I take it to school (where the signal is equally bad) but forget to take it off, so when someone's trying to reach me and it's sitting in a good signal spot, I still don't hear it ring. And it would just be nice to have something that I can take around with me. Plus I intend to open my own business soon, and I'd rather like to be able to set up an 800 number or the like. It's just as this point, I don't make (or receive) enough phone calls for it to be worth even the $15/mo, but for the most part I've heard good things.

As to the original story, it just sounds like someone was put on hold who happened to be a Vonage customer; the carrier was irrelavent and just another sensationalist FUD headline. While it's unfortunate that the system works so poorly, it's hardly Vonage's fault.

on hold

[gnuguru]

Tried to follow the link in the story, but the server put me on hold....

Re:on hold

[Spy der Mann]

Tried to follow the link in the story, but the server put me on hold....

And by the time you get to it, the server's gonna be a complete mess :P

Next at 6...

[SuperBanana]

It is being reported on the Vonage Forums that last month when Loren Veltkamp's Chanhassen, Minnesota home caught on fire, he immediately called 9-1-1 using Vonage. Unfortunately, Vonage put him on hold,

Next at 6: Slashdot links to Vonage-forum, forum webserver puts thousands on hold and THEN catches fire.

PS:Houses usually don't "catch" fire, like they're standing around and fire lands on them out of the blue. How'd the guy's house actually catch fire? Why didn't he have an extinguisher? Why didn't he hang up the phone and DIAL AGAIN?

PPS:The above is half serious and half spoofing the typical "apologist" line.

Re:Next at 6...

[udayb]

Sitting on a nice cushioned chair and asking these questions is easy; try thinking about it when your house is on fire.

Re:Next at 6...

[fishbowl]

Having had several house fires, including one catastrophic arson, I have to agree, the previous poster's question clearly indicates he doesn't know how fire can behave. The strangest thing for me, was seeing the fire spread to another room without actually passing through. The air at the top gets hot enough that the fire can spread in ways you'd never expect. The other thing that was just weird, was the kinds of things that weren't damaged, even though they were in a room that was basically, totally destroyed. Things like paper, and candles, that were more or less intact, but were close to other things like oak furniture that burned to ashes.

Anyway, if the choice is to call 911 from the phone in the burning house, or to exit the house and watch it burn in your rear view mirror as you drive the mile to the nearest neighbor (common enough in the sticks), or as you go door to door in your neighborhood finding that nobody is home... Well, you *still* shouldn't be in the house. This is one reason I keep my cell phone charged and within reach at all times. I've already determined that the 911 service is low-risk on that phone, and when I used it before, I was quickly connected to the police officer as he was en route to the scene of my emergency (burglary), so in case of fire, I'll stay in the house long enough to get my dog out, but not long enough to call 911.

If I had VOIP, I wouldn't even *try* to use it, because my first guess for the place for the fire to have started, would be one of the computers in the room where the broadband router is.

Re:Next at 6...

[karnal]

Several house fires, one arson, buglary...

Let me know where you live so I don't move there!!!

Re:Next at 6...

[fishbowl]

>Several house fires, one arson, buglary...

First fire was a kitchen fire my dad started in 1976. He was frying something and the oil caught in the pan. Before he could get it out, the fire had spread to the other side of the room, and caught a curtain on fire, and also started burning the pine cupboard over the sink, about two meters away from the stove. My dad put the pan fire out with flour (a lesson I feel grateful to have learned, which I've made use of in the kitchen and in the lab), and he got a bad 3rd degree burn on his hand.

Second fire was arson, in 1996. Someone set fire to the adjacent townhouse and burned down a four-unit, two-story townhouse. Pretty much everything I own has been acquired since then, because I basically lost all my possessions that day -- including a 4000+ record collection and a quite comprehensive collection Marvel comics going back to 1969, among other things. I'm still pretty bummed, but at least I wasn't killed (nobody was injured).
Both those fires were in Dallas Texas. I've also been in forest fires in Texas, Colorado, and Wyoming. (NO, I did not start them.)

The most recent property crime was this past Christmas Eve. Someone busted out the window on my Volvo, and grabbed my coat with my wallet in it. I'd only left it briefly, and I was already going back to get it. The main annoyance of that, was, losing all my cash, my ID, and my ATM card, that it was Christmas Eve and everybody I knew was out of town, so there was no way for me to get cash, which basically meant, I had to spend the whole week eating what I could scrounge from my pantry. That was in Arizona. I've been robbed at gunpoint in Texas, also shot at for no particular reason, also in Texas, and I've been robbed once, I assume at gunpoint but I'm not sure because I didn't care to find out, in California. Oh yeah, and I've been mugged in Atlanta.

I don't think there's any particular place you need to stay away from, you just need to stay away from *me* :-)

Re:Next at 6...

[webmind]

PS:Houses usually don't "catch" fire, like they're standing around and fire lands on them out of the blue. How'd the guy's house actually catch fire? Why didn't he have an extinguisher? Why didn't he hang up the phone and DIAL AGAIN?

who has fire extinguisher in his house?? I've been in many houses... never seen one.. unless there was a known firehazard.

Re:Next at 6...

[BVis]

Me, and lots of other people. Available at any hardware store.

*Vonage* put him on hold?

[fatboy]

I have had Vonage for well over a year, but have never dialed 911.

It is my understanding you are routed to your local PSAP.

Re:*Vonage* put him on hold?

[fatboy]

I just dialed 911 to verify it is working correctly. It connected directly to my local PSAP and they had all of the correct information about my address.

No on hold with Vonage for me.

Re:*Vonage* put him on hold?

[ResidntGeek]

Bad news folks... natural selection seems to have stopped working. We're in for a bad few millenia.

not suprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

I live about 6 minutes away from chanhassen, and the last time I called 911 I was put on hold. I called from a cell phone not voip so I'm geussing its just the local emergency services fault.

You know their stupid commercials...

[rice_burners_suck]

...with that annoying music they play, showing people doing stupid things. And then they say, "People do stupid things..."

I think their new commercial should show a guy getting Vonage and then his house burns down, and then they say, "People do stupid things. Going with Vonage is one of them."

Re:You know their stupid commercials...

[rice_burners_suck]

I remember when my cable bill was due one day and I hadn't paid it yet. There wasn't enough time left to mail it in, so I drove to their office to pay in person.

While I waited in line, I noticed that they had a whole wall of televisions set up, each showing a channel they offer, as if to entice you to get cable because these are the channels you'll get. But the picture quality was worse than a fiftieth generation VHS copy as viewed when the television is behind a smoke screen. If that is how bad the picture quality looks at the cable company's own offices, how bad will it look in your home?

And then to depend on such an irresponsible and retarded company for emergency services? I would like to invoke a certain profane word right now.

Re:You know their stupid commercials...

[teklob]

It's always bothered me the way the vonage commerical announces pronounce VOIP

Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[qwave54]

I had to call 911 a few times in the past few years, and every single time I've had nothing but trouble from them. One time when I witnessed a car accident and stayed to help, I called 911 because a woman at the scene had trouble getting out of her car (the door wouldn't open and her legs were pinned). The 911 operator *wouldn't believe* that she needed help and refused to send more than one police car. Luckily he came quickly and called for the proper help. Another time I had to call, I was transfered to the wrong emergency service. I needed the police, but was sent to the fire dept. While the fire operator was talking, the 911 operator interrupted the call and transfered me to the EMS! Again, interrupted and finally I got the police. Other times I've had operators who were rude and unhelpful.
So Vonage's 911 seems to be at par with the poor level of service given by the other 911 services.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[soft_guy]

I have had a similar experience. Once I called 911 because I had lost my TV Guide and I needed to know when Seinfeld was on. They were totally rude and unhelpful.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[lamp540]

This last new years day I observed a man breaking into cars in a parking lot, I called the police to tell them and when they asked me for my address and all I could provide was the neareast intersection(I slept over at someone's apartment) they told me to find out the address and then call them back.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[jmnormand]

in related news, national 911 services are now being routed to an call center in india...

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[MyLongNickName]

Easy solution. Just say "dang... I was hoping to not have to shoot another one of those damn thiefs. But ya gotta do what you gotta do". Then hang up. You will have eight squad cars in ten minutes.

And hopefully one of the cops will be trigger happy enough to fill the dude with lead.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[geekoid]

Odd.
WHen I have called 911, I talked to the same person regardless of the type of incident. They sent the proper people.

I ahve probably called 911 50 times since it's inception, in several different states. Never ahd a problem at all.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[noldrin]

Once I called 911 to report an emergency, Livestock were wondering a highway durring rushhour. I was told by 911 that this wasn't an emergency and I should hangup and call animal control. So this required me making a call to 411 over my cell phone, which cost me $2.50. I was then connected to the local police department. Thank you so much 911. Next time I'll tell them I'll call back after the accident has happened.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[fredklein]

I think you're looking for this joke:

An elderly man living alone was awoken by a stange noise in the middle of the night. He looked out of his back bedroom window and saw two men breaking into his garden shed. So he called 911 to report what was happening.
"I'm very sorry," said the sergeant, "but there's no-one available at present. When someone become free I'll send them along to your address."
Two minutes later he called 911 again.
"I'm sorry to bother you again about this," he explains, "but I called about a couple of minutes ago about a burgary. Don't bother to send anyone out, though, because I've just shot them."
Five minutes later the avenue is swarming with policemen and a SWAT team.,There are police vehicles in all the surrounding streets and a helicopter hovering overhead with search lights beaming. They catch the two burglars red handed.
"I thought you said you'd shot them," said the police sergeant.
"And I thought you said you had nobody available," replied the old man.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[dfenstrate]

And if America is anything like I think it is

It isn't.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[shambalagoon]

I've called 911 several times to report criminal activity in the neighborhood, and half the time the 911 operator puts me on hold for 5 minutes or more without even talking to me first. I use this time to boggle at the thought of needing them in a fire, robbery, or other life-threatening emergency.

This is in Dekalb County, GA. In case you were wondering.

Re:Regular 911 service is just as bad, or worse!

[Anonymous Meoward]

Once I called 911 to report an emergency, Livestock were wondering

'Tis a sad day in our fair republic when the imagination of livestock is a threat.

(Let's focus on the real problems, shall we? Like the imagination of those humans who wonder about livestock..)

A Five Alarm Fire?

[winkydink]

Five Alarm?

Just how big was his house? The Santana Row fire in San Jose was a five alarm fire and that was huge.
Methinks there's a wee bit of exaggeration going on here.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[tehfenx0r]

Eh probably, but there are some huge ass houses there.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[winkydink]

Still. They're going to call for reinforcements 4 more times?

I think they just decide to let the thing burn to the ground and make sure it doesn't spread.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Especially since he was able to go back to rescue his computer full of pirated music....

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[geekoid]

it depends on the department.
A fice alrm fire in Manhatten may be a bigger fire, then a five alarm fire in a smaller city/town.

Some departments that would mean Chief, tanker, ladder, all hands medical and help from another dept.

Some may be an alarm per dept.

The person on site making the calls may escalate to five alarm if they feel there was a high risk of the fire spreading.

That said, I do doubt it was a 5 alarm fire for a stand alone single dwelling unit

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[tehfenx0r]

Yeah that is kinda strange...did the house next door catch on fire too or something?

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[geekoid]

" Still. They're going to call for reinforcements 4 more times?"

% alarms doesn't always mean that. It depends on the city/county/town.

IT always means 'really bad'

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[dan828]

Depends on the town. The number of alarms is the number of substations that respond-- in LA a five alarm fire would be huge. In my town, the entire fire department will show up for a grass fire on the side of the freeway because they usually don't have a lot to do and like to race around with the sirens going when they get a chance.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[anthony_dipierro]

Some departments that would mean Chief, tanker, ladder, all hands medical and help from another dept.

That's a five-alarm? That's pretty much the standard response for a working fire where I used to live. I thought the number of alarms represented the number of different stations. (In which case 5 alarms is pretty damn big, though with the fact that the guy kept going back in the building to save his computers maybe they reported possible entrapment).

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[Carnildo]

Around here, a five-alarm fire means that five fire stations have sent everything they've got, and there are fifteen trucks on the scene. When the new university dorm complex burned to the ground, that was only a four-alarm fire.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[fishbowl]

>Yeah that is kinda strange...did the house next door catch on fire too or something?

In the woods, there's a different kind of emergency, where the surrounding forest hasn't YET caught fire, and it takes a hundred firefighters to keep it from spreading.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[anthony_dipierro]

As far as I know the fire station I used to volunteer for didn't even really use the term. Number of alarms was more a term used by the media. Also, this was a couple years ago, but I seriously doubt things have gotten *that* federalized since then.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[hurfy]

hehe, saved from looking up how many alarms that was called :)

I thouhgt 5 sounded way high for a house.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[SmurfButcher Bob]

That's not how alarms work; they do not need to be triggered "in sequence".

An alarm is merely a resource request, and (in many places) is part of a pre-planned response. This pre-planning varies by area, and incident type - meaning if I raise a "2nd alarm" at this house, I may get an entirely *different* response from a 2nd alarm at *that* house. Typically, we sort-of arrange them as a sequence of escallation, but not necessarily.

In our district, we've uniformly made certain that, regardless of which pre-plan is being used - our "sixth alarm" will start enough water-tankers to sustain an engine flowing 2500 gallons per minute. And as you just guessed, any actual fire we get - as soon as first-due has confirmed "smoke showing" in a non-hydrant area, their first act is to request the 6th alarm, since some of the neighboring tankers might be 20 minutes away. After the crew has completed a quick size-up of the situation, THEN they might consider raising a 2nd alarm OR a 3rd, if it is waranted - our first alarm will bring two engines and a truck; second alarm brings an additional engine and a truck; third alarm brings two additional engines. Fourth and Fifth are manpower.

So, a single floor stick frame in a non-hydrant area has a bread-n-butter fire. First due arrives, confirms smoke and requests a sixth alarm, and initiates a size-up of the incident. After looking around and peeking into a couple of windows, an actual fire is confirmed, but it appears to be room & contents - not structural. Single floor dwelling - one truck is overkill. We need engines, so the 3rd alarm is requested.

That's a typical evolution... alarms 1, 3, and 6. Others, you'll have alarms 1, 2 and 4. Or, 1 and 4. Or, 1 and 6.

What's the 9th alarm, you ask?

Food!

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[SmurfButcher Bob]

We do, but it's different - our county dispatch uses a "Box" system. It's fairly cool.

You draw polygons on a map, and assign it a "box number"... think of a "box" as a mail-slot, not a shape :) That box contains a sequence of response pre-plans for the various incident types - and you assign itto that specific location. A polygon can cover an entire neighborhood; it can likewise cover exactly a single house. Meanwhile, you can also assign the same box to several different polygons. It makes life very, very easy.

Our department uses four digit box numbers; we have two stations, so the first digit indicates which station will be first-due. The second digit indicates the incident type, and if the area is hydranted or not; the third indicates the type of structure (for fire) or roadway (accident), etc, and the fourth indicates the area - commercial, residential, apartments, farm, etc.

Attached to each box is the response pre-plan... called "alarms". Alarms are simply resource requests; For us, 1st alarm (the initial dispatch) will request certain pieces to a given incident. 2nd alarm... other pieces. 3rd alarm... others, still. 4th and 5th are typically manpower on fire boxes, or specialty rescue teams or equipment for other incident types - 4th alarm on a rescue box, for example, always starts a high-angle rope team. 5th alarm on a rescue box starts the dive team. 6th alarm on a fire box always starts an assload of water tankers, for cases where the local water is inadequate or frozen.

Obviously, alarms are not usually raised in sequence - if an idiot falls off a cliff and needs rescue, the result will be first-due raising alarms 2 and 4. An idiot drives his snowmobile through the ice, it'll be a rescue - with the first-due raising alarms 5 and 7 (sheriff heli).

Granted, that's here. Somewhere else, a fifth alarm might well be "drain the county"... but at that point, you might be better off requesting a bulldozer.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[SmurfButcher Bob]

Uh, FEBRUARY. You couldn't torch that canopy if you gassed it... not that there was a canopy; any fuel load there was too sparse to spread, never mind the moisture content.

Re:A Five Alarm Fire?

[fishbowl]

> Uh, FEBRUARY. You couldn't torch that canopy if you gassed it...

You think there aren't winter wildfires?

Re:Who needs 911?

[Marxist Hacker 42]

You can usually do both- just call your local phoneco and ask for a emergency-only line that only dials 911 and 0. Also known as Basic Dial Tone Service, it will cost you someplace between $0-$12/month, depending on whether or not they force you to get local dialing with it or not, and what taxes apply. Don't forget to plug in an old fashioned WIRED phone to the line, so that you have service in case of a power outage as well.

Re:Who needs 911?

[geekoid]

It used to be that in california you were chared 2.30 dollars for a line that you could only dial 911, and the phone company.

So you might want to look into that.

No lawsuit required!

[babbling]

They're giving him $20 credit and 7% off all his future 911 calls.

The sign on the porch....

[svunt]

...of the burnt down house: 0wnage by Vonage :D

Re:Who needs 911?

[anthony_dipierro]

I'm sure you can get a cell phone and keep the batteries charged for less than $12/month.

Same Problem in LA

[osmodion]

A few weeks ago I was rear ended. The damage to my car was pretty extensive, so one of my passengers called 911 while I talked to the other driver. He was on hold for well over five minutes. When someone finally answered, he handed the phone to me. I talked for about 4 seconds before being cut off by the operator. The nice version is that if no one was bleeding or dead, she was hanging up to deal with more important calls.

The call centers are vastly understaffed, which isn't Vonage's fault, so people get put on hold. End of story.

Re:Same Problem in LA

[Anonymous Coward]

No Shit sherlock. If its not an emergency, don't call 911. Dial 0 and ask the operator to connect you with a local precinct.

Re:Same Problem in LA

[The Cisco Kid]

Actually, it depends on your area. In some areas they tell you to ALWAYS use 911 to reach police/fire/etc. Even a vehicle accident with no injuries.

Re:Who needs 911?

[HappyDrgn]

Plug a phone into your wall outlet, or if you have a spare disconnected cell phone, keep it charged and make sure your family knows where it is. 911 service works on any phone line in the U.S. even if the service is not activated. We have Vonage, but we also have a backup phone plugged into the wall. The Internet is something I would want to rely on in an emergency.

Re:Who needs 911?

[Mr Pippin]

1. Having a choice in the matter helps. I despise the service being government mandated by the FCC on my behalf.

2. Who says you don't have access to emergency services? You almost certainly have a phone with autodial abilities. Have one for the fire department, police, and medical. This was how life was BEFORE 911. We didn't have civilization on the brink of chaos before 911 services. One usefull implementation of 911 applies to cell phones, and I'm wary of that, too.

This should surprise no one (911 horror stories)

[Russ Nelson]

This should surprise no one. 911 is not anywhere near as reliable as you think it could or should be. A friend of mine nearly cut off this thumb with a chop saw. He ran into the house, called 911, and .... it was busy. Rather than dick around bleeding (drip, drip), he called the one person he knew he could rely on: his office secretary (three cheers for secretaries!) She called the local ambulance service, they picked up, took him to the hospital, and after a little tendon reattachment surgery and months of rehab, he was good as new. No thanks to 911.

Why..?

[AWhiteFlame]

Why would you call 911 that your house is burning down over VoIP? While its nice and good, it just doesn't replace a wired or even cell phone. Besides, what if when one was calling 911 and the cable modem was in the process of being melted?

"not-too-good dept"??

[serutan]

Looks more like a candidate for the "huge fucking lawsuit dept".

Re:"not-too-good dept"??

[prockcore]

Looks more like a candidate for the "huge fucking lawsuit dept".

Doubtful. One, vonage didn't put him on hold.. the call center did. Two, the guy was arrested and the police are questioning him about possible arson.

This is a total non-story. Guy burns down his own house for insurance money and tries to blame his failure to call 911 on vonage.

Try Billion 7402VGP (modem,router,voip box)

[ivi]

If he had been using the subj. modem device,
his emergency call might have been put through
to 911 directly, with Vonage out of the picture.

The feature is known as "Lifeline"...

Nope.

[Russ Nelson]

wouldn't you pay $12.00 a month extra to be able to access emergency services??

Not hardly worth $12/month. Maybe $1/month, tops.

I don't even use 911

[icebergman]

Most cities and towns have emergency lines that connect you directly to your local dispatch center. If you call 911 from a cell phone or VoIP phone, you usually get connected to a central dispatch center that has to relay all the info to your local dispatcher. Even though E911 doesn't work when calling local emergency numbers, it will almost always save several minutes on emergency response times.

happens all the time in LA

[climbon321]

I've had the exact same experiance. Try calling 911 to report an accident while it's raining in Los Angeles (the stories about people not being able to drive in the rain and an understatement) Last time I tried I got a busy signal, call again and hung up after being on hold for 5 minutes. Seems like a little FUD to me.

RTFA - He was on "hold"...

[NotQuiteReal]

He was in the house because he was on hold. It said so, right in the summary.

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[thogard]

Don't people know the phone number of the local fire, ambulance and police departments anymore? If you can't remember it, then maybe have it written down or entered in the cell phone.

Re:Who needs 911?

[TEMM]

Just buy a regular el-cheapo cell phone. Most of them can make outgoing 911 emergency calls without having a sim card in them.

Re:Who needs 911?

[RobertLTux]

psst you may want to get a prepaid cell phone (1 year of "lifeline service" is ~$100 with a few providers) since a recent national provider MUST BY FEDERAL LAW include a gps chip (cell version of e-911).

Obligatory Simpsons' quote

[MagicDude]

Flanders drives into his driveway and Bart panics, pleading with Lisa to leave. Instead she climbs the stairs, but Bart warns her she'll be trapped. He sees Ned looking angry, walking with an ax.

Bart: [watching Flanders] An ax. He's got an ax! I'll save you, Lisa! [tries to walk on his broken leg, falls back] Uh, I'll save you by calling the police. [dials 911]

Voice: Hello, and welcome to the Springfield Police Department Resc-u- Fone[tm]. If you know the name of the felony being committed, press one. To choose from a list of felonies, press two. If you are being murdered or calling from a rotary phone, please stay on the line.

Bart: [growls, punches some numbers]

Voice: You have selected regicide. If you know the name of the king or queen being murdered, press one.

Re:Obligatory Simpsons' quote

[Kaenneth]

Should have used 912.

Re:Don't forget...

[symbolic]

...to factor in all the nasty taxes they keep adding on as "fees" that bump up the cost considerably.

Re:Who needs 911?

[Sarisar]

A little off-topic but I believe the emergancy number for a cell phone is 123 and that should work in _any_ country regardless of if you have credit. As long as the phone can get any signal. So a British or Aussie ophone in the US is useless.

I was in Oz last year and had a cell phone over there and half the time I didn't get my carriers signal but it had a big 'SOS Calls ONLY' meaning it had found SOMETHING it could connect to and dial out in an emergancy. Couldn't make any other phone calls but could at least do that. Of course the time we saw this huge bush fire we had no signal and couldn't do anything but there is the CDMS / Satellite phone combo thing if you want 100% coverage in Oz (the only type of phone, so the adverts say, that would work EVERYWHERE in Australia).

Something doesn't seem to fit

[Ah huh and then]

Looks like this person needed someone to blame. First off, this was not a five alarm fire. Thoes are just slightly bigger, usually apartment building or commerical wherehouses. More then one firetruck will arive at a five alarm fire, hense the name. One other kinda fishy thing is

"by the time fire crews arrived, the fire had become a five-alarm blaze. The house was a total loss."

which conficts with Veltkamps own statment in the local media:

"When I was ordered out of the building, I didn't want to comply with that," Veltkamp said. Fire crews convinced him to leave, but he later re-entered the home - followed by police. "They chased me in, saying they were going to taze me if I didn't come out," Veltkamp said. He then ran from police through the house, and escaped out of the basement.

It probably didn't help that the firecrews had to shoot water over trees at this house either video http://kstp.dayport.com/viewer/viewerpage.php?Art_ ID=165697&NoAds=true local report http://www.kstp.com/article/stories/S14441.html?ca t=1

Re:Something doesn't seem to fit

[pintpusher]

warning Active X required to view that video. um. thanks but no thanks.

Re:Something doesn't seem to fit

[SmurfButcher Bob]

I think I read some details on that fire - the fire was through the roof when first-due rolled on-scene. Generally, if the fire has self-vented in all but a few specific types of construction - such a structure is considered a loser unless there are intact firewalls running all the way up to the peak, which is unlikely in a residence. Combine that with truss construction and engineered wood products (and this structure definately had trussing), the structure is automatically a write-off. With truss or engineered wood construction, crews are typically forbidden from entering the structure after 10 minutes of fire unless (1) there is a victim inside, AND (2) there's a prayer of saving them... and even then, we'll honestly consider if it's worth the risk, based on the time that has elapsed. Truss + Fire = 12 minute "roof falls onto you" deathtrap, and EWood + Fire = 4 minute "floor falls under you" deathtrap, period, no exceptions.

That's why, like you, I'm almost baffled that the police chased this idiot inside - but from the size of the structure in the video, half of the building could be flashing over while at the other end of it, you'd never know it. With a smaller structure, he'd not have gotten two steps into the door and still be able to see, let alone breathe all of the phosgene & methal-ethyl-kills-you shit in the air. Since neither he nor the cops needed rescue, it pretty much demands that "when fire crews arrived" the fire was at one end of the house (the end farthest away from the platform truck, judging by the extent of the burn there), and he was running into the near-end, which wasn't involved (or smoke filled) yet. That the fire vented itself so quickly is probably a major factor as to why the rest of the structure wasn't a lethal atmosphere, as well.

For your own fun - shooting the water over the trees wasn't really relevent; by the time you use a master stream (such as from the platform in the video) - those things flow anywhere from 1500 to 2500 gallons per minute - it's over.

Why, you ask?

One gallon of water weighs 8 pounds. Our truck is rated at 2500 GPM; from a draft, it can (real life) sustain around 2200 GPM; that's 17 thousand, 600 pounds of weight per minute that we're dumping onto the floor of that structure. A typical stream like that will be flowed for up to 5 or 10 minutes, since you're trying to suppress fire on the ceiling and walls - and most of the water is on the floor, in a structure that's already (heavily) compromised... and actively being further compromised, to boot. Five minutes... 88 thousand pounds, 44 tons of weight... that's like having, what, about 30 cars parked on that floor? Even if we do succeed in knocking down the fire, the odds of the structure surviving US is small, at best... and that's one master stream. If placement allows, we'll use two, plus (if warranted) a portable from the ground, shooting into a window.

So, apparatus placement didn't help much, as you said - but using THAT specific piece is typically a "fat lady singing" move when a residence is involved; the trusses (what few are left) in the video are a dead giveaway. A fire in that type of construction... first alarm should bring two engines and a truck; second alarm should bring an additional engine and truck (and water supply, if needed); third alarm brings coffee; fourth alarm brings donuts; fifth alarm brings pizza and fresh cell phone batteries - because if the first alarm crew couldn't nail it, it's moot. Steel Trussing sucks; Wood Trussing really, really sucks; the only thing worse is Engineered Wood.

For what it's worth, we have several similarly *stupid* houses in our district, that have little or no access for truck or engine placement - some, you cannot even fit a freakin E-One up the driveway, let alone a stick or platform truck. For those, we've added a trailer to our Mini brush-truck; 1500 feet of supply line, a bunch of gated water-theives, and four attack lines. If WE get stuck with a fire in such a place, our initial alarm will

Re:Something doesn't seem to fit

[binford2k]

No ActiveX needed :)

mplayer mms://dayport.wmod.llnwd.net/fc/a258/e1/n3d/0003/1 4085020060223_000158p1000814p0.wmv

Re:Something doesn't seem to fit

[NateTech]

Bob, all I can say is "well done"... nice post.

But you do know that it's not traditional to actually KNOW anything about the topic being discussed on Slashdot, right? ;-)

Seriously -- interesting read. Thanks.

We're sorry...

[ursabear]

[deep operator recorded voice]We're sorry... the publicly-recognized essential service is no longer in service or has been disc...[/deep operator recorded voice]

In any event, all humor aside - wouldn't it feel pretty bad to have a *real* emergency and be put on hold? Perhaps there are holes in the story, and maybe it is even a bit blown out of proportion. However, if someone I love was in real danger, or if my home was on fire, I'd call 911. I haven't waded through the 50+ "green" pages in the phone book to find all the important direct-dial emergency numbers.

Call centers (including 911 dispatch) are woefully understaffed because of economics (public or private).

Re:Disclaimer?

[fishbowl]

>Doesn't vonage make sure to state that their service is not meant for emergency or 911 calls?

The problem is, the "service" is a telephone at the endpoint where a person uses it. That person is not necessarily the person to whom Vonage has communicated this disclaimer. It looks like a telephone. The person who dials 911 on that telephone expects it to work, and at that point, it's a matter of life or death that it works, and the service provider does have a responsibility to not put that call on hold, arbitrarily drop the connection, or route it to a call center a thousand miles away.

Re:Who needs 911?

[slazzy]

mod parent up!

Also a paper with emergency numbers posted beside the phone helps even if you don't have a phone with speed dial. It will take you five minutes, and it could save your life. Simple!

Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Unknown Poltroon]

If you are ever woken up by the smell of smoke/fire in your house, you have just about three minutes to get out before you die. Basicly, the amount of smoke and gasses in the air that are enough to wake you up are jsut slightly les then it takes to kill you.

Also, a tiny fire can turn life threatening in jsut a couple of minutes. Fire is not somehitn to be fucked with.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fire is not somehitn to be fucked with.

No way, playing with fire is cool! FIRE! FIRE! FIRE!

Excuse me while I go torch my house down...

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[8ball629]

Well, smoke alarms don't wake everyone up...

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[NumberGod]

I really hate to disappoint you, but the smoke and gasses WILL NOT WAKE YOU.

They put you into a deeper sleep, while removing all the oxygen from the air.

Then you die. Not from the flames. From not having oxygen.

At least that's what they taught me at paramedic school.

Get yourself a smoke alarm for every bedroom. It might save your life one day.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Eivind]

IF you are waken up.

A large portion of the people who die in fires die sleeping in their beds, never waking at all.

Get a smoke-alarm. It's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot of an improvement.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Maximum Prophet]

Not completely true. I had asthma as a child. One night, my electric blanket got bunched up and began to smoke. I woke up because the smoke made me think I was having an asthma attack. When my parents turned the light on, we saw the smoke and called the fire department. They figured it out and carrried the bed outside. Once it hit the outside fresh air it the mattress burst into flames.

This was before smoke alarms were common, but the next day, my dad bought and installed one.

I had a friend that was woken up when her dog started barking at the smoke in her kitchen caused by faulty wiring.

Moral of the Story: Electric blankets: bad. Smoke Alarms: good. Dogs: double-plus good.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[AcidLacedPenguiN]

put 10 in your room, that'll wake you.
If it doesn't, and you survive the fire, then put 100 in your room.
If that doesn't wake you, and you survive that fire, then move to the bottom of a lake, because you aren't safe in our fire-friendly above-ground society.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Lumpy]

If you are ever woken up by the smell of smoke/fire in your house, you have just about three minutes to get out before you die.

and if you are too retarted to spend $9.99 on a fire/smoke alarm then you really deserve to die in your sleep during a fire.

There is no excuse at ALL for not having fire alarms all over your house.

I dont even change the batteries. I replace all the alarms yearly in my home because thay are so stinking cheap.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Hey, charcoal is a neeccessary ingredient in Bachelor Cooking!

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[TheCarp]

Actually.... smoke detectors in my exeroeince are way too sensative.

Its the whole false alarm problem. Sure its nice that a little smoke sets em off to let you know with plenty of time to get out of the house...

but in our house the smoke detectors are linked. We had to remove all the ones within 1 room of the kitchen, because every time someone cooked something at night, they would go off and wake everyone up.

Seriously, I am the home owner... I know how bad it is not to have smoke detectors around the kitchen. I know we are going to get in trouble if a fire inspector ever comes (realistically we will know its comming and just reinstall them I guess but still...)

however, what good are they? Nobody gets up and leaves when they go off anyway... because they have gone off for no reason way too many times.

Its a bad situation, but what are you going to do? The detectors don't have a sensitivity setting, and seriously the smallest amount of smoke set them off.

When your a little drunk, it was hard to make a grilled cheese without waking everyone up.

When you live in a hosue of 5 mid-20s guys... that can be a very common problem :)

-Steve

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[Booshi]

Don't put too much stock in smoke detectors either. While it's essential to have the proper number installed in the proper places in our homes and to test them regularly, it's also essential to remember that they sometimes fail. In a new home with more than the recommended number of detectors hardwired into the electrical system, I had a fire that caused $15,000 in damage and not one of the smoke detectors ever went off, and the power was not interrupted during the fire. Yeah...they *do* go off...when I make toast...but I've lost the sense of security I had before. Just because they go off now and then when we're making burnt offerings isn't a guarantee that they'll work when *we're* about to be made burnt offerings.

Re:Something i learned about smoke and fire.

[winwar]

"but in our house the smoke detectors are linked. We had to remove all the ones within 1 room of the kitchen, because every time someone cooked something at night, they would go off and wake everyone up."

Ever considered install alarms that weren't linked?

Perhaps improve ventilation?

Or, as last resort, learn how to cook? :)

Re:Who needs 911?

[Achromatic1978]

The number is 112. However most cellphones worldwide will route 911, 000, and 999 all to emergency services.

Most cellphones will work in the US, other than the shoddy coverage of GSM. Particularly given that most cellphones are tri/quad band.

Country coverage in Australia is still a little spotty. Did you mean CDMA, not CDMS?

Loren Veltkamp ...

[Fooby]

was convicted for assaulting a former tenant of his while performing a "citizen's arrest" for failure to pay rent. He appealed the case pro se, and unsurprisingly lost on his irrelevent legal arguments. The man seems to be a bit nutty, if not dangerous.

Re:Who needs 911?

[Sarisar]

Yeah probably CDMA... can't remember :P

But the (very) cheap phone I bought in Oz did not pick a signal up in the US (was a single band). Yeah I tried out of interest.

"Vonage 911 works differently than 911"

[PseudoThink]

Haha, I just saw one of their commercials a few minutes ago. Now I know what they meant by the small "Vonage 911 works differently than 911" text at the bottom of the screen, near the end of the ad.

Re:Not important.

[MyLongNickName]

I believe such facilities would not have to call 911. I think they have alternate ways to get ahold of the folks they need to. Anyone have more info on this than I can provide?

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[MrNonchalant]

Don't people know the phone number of the local fire, ambulance and police departments anymore?

Generally not, because we were always taught 911 was reliable. It's shorter, it's one number, and it's supposed to get results.

Depends

[Riturno]

Depends on the locale and how 911 is implemented. Currently, we have to call 911 for things as minimal as noise complaints. They barely send officers for break-ins, yet alone for all 911 calls. The last place we lived, they'd send an officer for all 911 calls.

A better way to put it.

[ConnortheMad]

Woo hoo woo hoo hoo doesn't allow woooooooooo woo woo woo.

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[multipartmixed]

Not only that, in my neighbourhood, they're HARD to find, and have changed since 911 came out, due to municipal amalgamations and so forth.

I spent about 25 minutes one night trying to find a phone number for the fire department, so they could help me with a fuel leak which wasn't actually an *emergency*, but certainly a ticking time bomb to public safety and the environment.

Anyhow, I finally found the number, called them, explained what was going on to the shocked phone-answered, and got a visit from the fire department about a half hour later. They were pretty cool about it, I also didn't get a bill in the mail for using an emergency service improperly.

Re:Who needs 911?

[gstoddart]

1. Having a choice in the matter helps. I despise the service being government mandated by the FCC on my behalf.

Meh.

Mandating 911 service is one of those things like speed limits, seat-belt laws, laws against drinking and driving, etc. Far more lives and property are saved by requiring it than whatever perceived liberties you think you're giving up by having it imposed upon you.

You may think driving through town with a lamp-shade on your head, a goat on your lap, 17 midgets dancing in the front seat, and a bottle of scotch in your hand is something you shouldn't be prevented from doing. The rest of us are glad you are prevented from doing it.

2. Who says you don't have access to emergency services? You almost certainly have a phone with autodial abilities.

Brilliant idea until you have out of town guests and they can't remember the crash course you gave them on auto-dialing the correct emergency service -- assuming you gave it to them. A four year old knows to call 911, and more than a few have done so; your brilliant solution of complicated auto-dial systems will probably cost lives. In fact, it did for a lot of years, because every place you went had a completely different set of numbers to call.

Requiring 911 service falls into the category of ... deal with it. You can rail about it all you like, it's probably not going anywhere. The statistics on its effectiveness are far too overwhelming at this point to undo it now.

Re:Who needs 911?

[VP]

Why don't you have access to 911 services? All VoIP phone providers are required to provide E911 service, which will connect to the exactly same call center a POTS would. All you have to do is enter your full and correct address in the VoIP provider's system.

I am using Packet8, and I have full 911 service.

People like you are part of the problem

[chocolatetrumpet]

People like you are part of the problem, just maybe?

Re:People like you are part of the problem

[mrchaotica]

The only problem is, what other number are you going to call to get a policeman dispatched to make a report? The only way to reach a dispatcher is 911 (at least where I live [metro Atlanta])!

Re:People like you are part of the problem

[man_ls]

In FL, I call *FHP and get the Highway Patrol to come to the scene.

Or, I find the Sherrif's Office non-emergency number, and call that.

RTFA? What are you, crazy? This is Slashdot...

[kadathseeker]

How'd the guy know it was Vonage putting him on hold and not the call center? When my cell fails it doesn't put me on hold or tell me if it is service or that number (kinda like an error 404). I just get something generic like "number could not be reached" or "please try again".

Re:RTFA? What are you, crazy? This is Slashdot...

[fishbowl]

> How'd the guy know it was Vonage putting him on hold and not the call center?

Maybe there was some distinctive message, or some evidence of that nature? Or maybe not. We don't know. We don't even know the story isn't a complete hoax. And if it's not a hoax, we don't know if the delay wasn't between the CO and the 911 call center. Or if the Vonage call perhaps put him through *faster* than a landline at the same location would have done. Honestly, we don't know very much at all. None of the details that I'd want to know if I were on a jury for this case, either between the homeowner and Vonage, or between him and his insurer.

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[LearningHard]

I had a similar experience. Except instead of relying on others I applied pressure to my finger and drove to the hospital. In fact I've never taken an ambulance to the hospital for anything even when I broke my shin. I hopped to my truck, jumped in and drove to the hospital and hopped into the emergency room.

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[bani]

most of the publically available numbers are not staffed 24/7 and are usually not the appropriate numbers for dispatch. call your local police department and you'll generally get a nice voice menu where you have to navigate 15 levels deep to reach someone.

only 911 is guaranteed to be staffed 24/7.

Major accident == busy signal

[Gorimek]

If by 'major accident' you mean something seen by a lot of people, this is most likely because half of them called at the same time as you.

That's a fundamental vulnerability of the 911 system, but I don't know that there's mmuch you can do about that.

Re:Major accident == busy signal

[assassinator42]

But you want to avoid the situation where a lot of people see it and no one calls in. So do you keep trying to call, or forget it?

Re:Major accident == busy signal

[Strenoth]

you Call, and if you get a busy signal, assume that at least one other person already managed to call faster than you did, in the case of something major that's visible to lots of people. If it's somethign not a lot of people might have seen, keep trying to call.

Light on details, heavy on hype, I should know

[BcNexus]

I see no conclusive evidence to blame Vonage.

TFA doesn't explain what "put on hold" is. This vague problem could be with any number of systems, which could belong to Qwest (very big here in Minnesota), or some other company. Or , to echo other comments, the 911 center in Chanhassen ould have been understaffed and may have put the caller on hold.

Moreover, KSTP Channel 5 has shitty sensationalist news. I live in Saint Paul MN. In my opinion, Channel five news is a joke. The news team offers interesting headlines without necesary details in the actual stories.

In conclucsion, readers, please don't give this ancedotal /. story any consideration; there simply aren't enough details, and I think the station that first reported the story isn't trustworthy for detailed, accurate stories.

Re:Light on details, heavy on hype, I should know

[Peyna]

That's the way it sounds to me. I researched Vonage's 911 capabilities before signing up and if you give them your correct address and have it enabled properly, it will automatically route 911 calls to the appropriate location and send your address and information along with the call. If he did get Vonage instead of 911, either the capability isn't available in his area yet, or he messed with some default settings.

Re:Light on details, heavy on hype, I should know

[Peyna]

To clarify this a little bit, plugging in your vonage router and plugging a phone into it DOES NOT automatically enable 911 calling. You have to actually go enable it online (or I'm sure you could do it over the phone). All you have to do is click one button and put in your correct address.

IIRC, the package I received came with detailed instructions on how to enable 911 dialing, along with numerous disclaimers and warnings. If he didn't do that, it's not Vonage's fault. I suspect they added this extra step so as to make sure they have the correct address. Imagine if it was automatic and you had your unit shipped to work. While you lay on the floor in your living dying of a heart attack, the ambulance is 30 miles away at your office trying to find you.

911 puts people on hold -all- the time.

[Aqua OS X]

I've yet to read the forum post since the link is currently Slashdoted.This may have been a problem with Vonage forwarding the call, or the Public Safety Answering Point (PSAP).

All e911 calls get forwarded to a local PSAP. With a wireline this is fairly easy since your address is a given. Moreover, the same can be said about a mobile phone. Your location can be determined via GPS or or your proximity to two cells. With VoIP this is different... your IP address doesn't store your physical location.

I don't quite know how this problem is or has been resolved, but that said, PSAPs royally suck. PSAPs frequently give people busy signals and or put people on hold for upwards of 10 minutes.

This is especially bad during peek times, such as commute hours. Every moron in the world is on the road armed with a device that can both distract, cause accidents, AND make a 911 call. Needless to say, we need more PSAPs.

Moreover, a non-emergency number would be a god send. A massive portion of e911 calls aren't even emergencies.

Re:911 puts people on hold -all- the time.

[Shadyman]

With VoIP this is different... your IP address doesn't store your physical location. Sorry to burst your bubble, Vonage has made it a requirement, at least in Canada, that if you want to use their 911 service, that you provide your street address on a page under account information so they know which center to connect you to.

Re:911 puts people on hold -all- the time.

[tx_kanuck]

That's great, and if you take your adapter to another location then the police will be showing up at the wrong address.

Your IP does NOT show your physical address. You're thinking of something else.

Re:911 puts people on hold -all- the time.

[Aqua OS X]

Burst my bubble?

You can NOT gain a physical location from an IP address...that's the very reason why VoIP customers are commonly required or advised their give notice of their address.

Moreover, registering an address is a fairly crappy solution at that. VoIP, like a cell phone, does not have to be tethered to a single location at all times.

VoIP providers are being required to come up with something more substantial in the states.

Re:Not important.

[1u3hr]

let's say a chemical factory or nuke reactor catches fire - you really really REALLY want to get 911 right there, right then

No you don't. They'll have a real hotline and automated alarms to the relevant emergency responders, they won't go through the 911 call centre. Aside from their own firemen and such on site.

A predictable problem

[Captain Sensible]

At the risk of being modded down, I will now violate three /. conventions in this reply:
1) I will address the larger issue raised her;
2) I will not speak in a narrowly US-centric viewpoint;
3) I will not attack other viewpoints by sematic arguments and hair-splitting.

The larger - issue: Emergency calls by VOIP raise predictable problems that are being addressed by competent telephone service providers. Most nations have an emergency number (911 in the US, 000 in Australia, 999 in Britain, 112 in France etc). Locating an emergency call from a wired connection is trivial - look it up in the database. Locating a call from a mobile is a little trickier, but you can narrow the call down to the base station and perhaps even triangulate from there. But a VOIP call could be from anywhere.

Most telcos are trying to find solutions and the ITUhttp:///http://www.itu.int/> have been sponsoring discussion on this. The obvious solution involves matching the IP address to a location, but dynamic addresses, NATs etc make this problematic.

Telcos report that 90% of emergency calls are hoaxes or misdirected. In some places the call centres are under-resourced, staff are ill-trained or lack language skills and may be located at a great geographical distance from the caller. Some genuine callers are foreigners with no local language, others are panicky or just stupid.

Voip also often suffers from dropped packets, latency or poor audio quality. There may be compatability issues with the PSTN.

The underlying problem is that VOIP is an evolving technology and the market is driving development. Emergency call centres are typical telco institutions designed for a structured, centrally-directed system where development proceeds at a leisurely pace - thats how the phone system has always worked. I predict that governments will start to mandate location-specific data for VOIP protocols to fix this.

Re:A predictable problem

[The Cisco Kid]

Except for the fact that there IS no way to reliable know the location of an IP address a Voip device is connected with. There is no way to create a way. Physical location correlation of IP addresses (except for some very rough guessing of countries or regions you can do based on the RIR that assigned the IP, that is certainly not nearly fine enough to be useful for emergency calls) is NOT possible.

Here is the real solution:

1. Make it bleedingly clear that while it might be possible to make emergency calls over voip (and certainly the voipco's should be encouraged to do so, as well as allowed access to the trunks [which are the only way to route a call to the emergency call center] that the monopoly telcos have a strangehold on, as well as encouraging the call centers to peer over voip themselves, eliminating that stranglehold), that they are absolutely not reliable for this purpose, and should never be relied on. This would include never blaming a voip company if such a call didnt work.

2. Require the monopoly telco (the one that owns the copper in the ground) to offer an 'emergency only' dialtone service on every line that has ever had service, either for free or at least $DAMNCHEAP (speaking US-centrically, $5/mo would sound about right - without any additional fees).

Re:Who needs 911?

[Mr Pippin]

your brilliant solution of complicated auto-dial systems will probably cost lives
The market already addressed this issue. http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?produc tId=2102456
Explaining pictures to children works better than numbers, btw.
Also, one time cost, versus the recurring one I have to pay for 911

Fire: respect it or die

[garylian]

Actually, speaking as a former firefighter, it isn't common for folks to misunderstand how dangerous a fire can be. Most folks freak completely out. They panic, and make mistakes they should know better than to do.

Small grease fires take out a whole kitched because the panicked homeowner throws water on it, instead of something like flour.

It's simple Fight or Flight syndrome. Most folks run for it (flight), but without applying a thought process to what they are doing. Those that try to deal (fight) with it aren't usually trained to deal with it properly. Sometimes even those that ARE trained get caught by something they didn't expect.

Fires are nothing to mess around with. Those that have a healthy respect for them can deal with it once they are properly trained. Those that don't, tend to die, even with training. Just check out the number of firefighters that die each year due to really dumb things like buildings falling on them.

Most firefighter deaths (that aren't due to traffic accidents or heart attacks) were completely preventable. There's usually a cover-up, for the officers in charge, all the way down to even the victim's themselves. Nobody wants to tarnish a hero's legacy, even if said "hero" had their head up their ass and was in a place they should have known better than to be, or was doing something they shouldn't have done. The public doesn't end up knowing, but most of it ends up getting caught on tape by some bystander, and then the government ends up buying the tape rights so that it doesn't get on the 11 o'clock news. Then, they show it as training video, and tell us "See, these guys are dumbfucks, and so is their commanding officer". And yet, more than half the class would still make the same mistake.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[Lehk228]

Small grease fires take out a whole kitched because the panicked homeowner throws water on it, instead of something like flour.

Flour? you sure you want to be throwing fine powdered carbohydrates on a fire?
sugar is coarse enough salt would be much better, if you have a fire hot enough to do anything to salt the whole being a dead cloud of vapor would matter more than the fire not going out.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[blaksaga]

I had a kitchen fire start once when I was about 16. My loving mother turned the stove on as she walked out the door and told me not to forget about. Well, I don't know whether my selective hearing tuned her out or if I just forgot but it didn't take long before the house was full of smoke. I ran out to the kitchen and the large pot of oil (vegetable, canola, idk) was flaming about 4-5 feet high and hitting the ceiling. The first thing I did was turn off the stove and go for the fire extinguisher...empty...go figure. Next I grabbed a box of baking powder and threw it on the flames; it didn't help. Finally I just grabbed a couple of large hot-mits, opened the patio door, and carried it out onto the deck where I let it burn itself out. It did make quite a mess; the ceiling was black and the plastic dials on the stove were melted out of shape but at least I saved the kitchen/house.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[terrymr]

A wet towel or a fire blanket will do the job with a grease fire ... biggest mistakes are a) water b) trying to take the burning pan outside.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[AJWM]

If the fire's still in the pot, just put the damned lid on it. Or take the whole thing outside and dump it in a snowbank (as I did when I was about 13 -- the kitchen back door happened to be right beside the stove).

Otherwise use the fire extinguisher you keep in the kitchen.

What, you don't?

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[AJWM]

Taking it outside is okay (as an above poster and I can attest to from personal experience) as long as you don't have to go more than a couple of feet to the door (carrying a pot of burning liquid through the house isn't a great idea) and you can do it without burning yourself (which would probably cause you to drop the pot, with disastrous consequences).

Water, of course is a mistake. (And for anyone that doesn't fully grasp why, consider that water is (a) denser than oil and (b) boils at below grease's flashpoint. It'll sink to the bottom of the pot and flash to steam, propelling the burning oil all over the place.)

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[Pinachi]

Yeah, throwing flour on a grease fire. That is the most stupid thing I think a real fire fighter could say. Powdered flour is extremely explosive. If it's really grainy it would work, if there is any fine flour in there though you'll get a nice flash fire that would spread it around the room. The stupidity almost is up there with throwing coffee creamer on a fire. Use baking soda or a fire extinguisher.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[mpe]

A wet towel or a fire blanket will do the job with a grease fire ... biggest mistakes are a) water b) trying to take the burning pan outside.

A fire extinguisher may not be the best idea though. Directing a pressurised jet of anything directly at a burning liquid can make things worst.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[iainl]

Fire blanket for precisely these situations? Check.

Snowbank? Umm, not within a couple of hundred miles, no.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[nahdude812]

Trying to move a burning pot outside (especially in the case of a grease / oil fire) could be insanely dangerous! Most people don't realize how hot a grease fire can actually be (significantly hotter than boiling water or the fire in your fireplace). Of course the actual temperature depends on the type of grease.

They might grab the pot, start moving it toward a door, and be overcome by the heat, slopping some burning grease onto themselves or onto the floor, if they don't drop the pot completely.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[nahdude812]

A properly used fire extinguisher should be ok. It is a common mistake for someone not trained in using a fire extinguisher to get as close to the fire as they can, when the extinguisher is actually more effective from several feet away. Most of the force of the extinguisher should be dispelled before the blast reaches the fire.

Few people have extinguisher training. Another common mistake is to direct the extinguisher at the flame itself, which of course puts most of the retardant past the source of the flame.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[ModernGeek]

That's why you keep baking soda in the fridge. It keeps food from smelling, and if you have a little grease fire on the stove, it is only an arms length away. I'm a newbie firefighter, and I went to my first real house fire yesterday, and was there for seven hours. It was in the middle of nowhere, and the whole place burned down.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[voxelman]

Interesting artical in Wired about US fire fighting techniques vs those elsewhere.

http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/fir efight.html

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[W2IRT]

I'm a newbie firefighter, and I went to my first real house fire yesterday, and was there for seven hours. It was in the middle of nowhere, and the whole place burned down.

Please correct the following sentence:
The fire were put out by the volunteer fire department before any damage could be done.

Corrected, it should read:
The fire was put out before any damage could be done by the volunteer fire department.

(Just Kidding!)
Sorry to hear your first working fire was the total loss of a house. Hopefully everyone's OK.

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[CharlieG]

so does having a tight fitting metal cover for the pot/pan, and always keeping it out when cooking - I've had grease catch in the bottom of a pan - reach over, pick up cover, put on pan, turn off burner. Amazing what happens when you cut off the source of air and heat - take 2 of the 3 legs of the triangle out, fire goes out fast

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[Machina Fortuno]

http://science.howstuffworks.com/question150.htm Hahaha! Flour! Sugar too!

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[TheCarp]

You hardly need tight fitting.

ANythign that covers enough of the area to causes gases to build up and not enough oxygen in will do it. I often can't find the properly fitting lid for my pans, but I can usually find a bigger one that will at least cover it, if not fit well.

Good enough is all you need.

-Steve

Re:Fire: respect it or die

[AJWM]

Trying to move a burning pot outside (especially in the case of a grease / oil fire) could be insanely dangerous!

Could be, yes, for the points you mention. In my case it was a small, relatively deep pot (not full, so less likely to spill) with an insulated handle. My older sister was just standing there freaking out so I opened the back door, grabbed the pot and dropped it in the snowbank. It was literally all of about 2 steps from the stove to the door -- any further and I'd have done something else.

I wouldn't do that in the kitchen in this house -- that's why there's a fire extinguisher handy.

That's life

[frankbenjones]

I called 911 the other day to report a ladder in the middle of the freeway. My call wasn't answered for over 2 minutes. So Vonage putting someone on hold doesn't seem so bad. I've asked and the 911 operator says it is the correct number to dial to report these things (in Calif).

Re:That's life

[slippyblade]

Um, except that "a ladder in the freeway" is in no way an emergency. And you sir, just contributed to someone with a REAL emergency getting put on hold. gg

Re:That's life

[fishbowl]

>Um, except that "a ladder in the freeway" is in no way an emergency.

My understanding was, he had to wait on hold before anyone could have decided whether it was an emergency or not.

Re:That's life

[frankbenjones]

I disagree. If it causes an accident due to someone swerving to hit it that is a problem and it should be cleared as quickly as possible. I've seen that exact same thing cause an accident. I've asked the 911 operator if I should call such things in and they have told me that I should and I've asked if there is another number I should call and I've been told no. Regards

Re:That's life

[bishop32x]

A ladder in the freeway isn't an emergency, a car sweving to avoid the ladder and hitting a school bus is. Just because the emergency hasn't happened yet doesn;t meen you shouldn't call.

Re:That's life

[The Cisco Kid]

Debris on the freeway that is likely to cause an accident is very much an emergency. Consider someone either driving over one and losing control of their vehicle, or swerving to avoid it and rolling over into another vehicle, or causing someone else to lam on the brakes and get rear-ended by a semi. All very likely.

recent article about that

[AlienBrain]

There was a recent string of articles in the Oregonian about the perception of callers feeling that they were treated rudely by the dispatchers. I don't think I've ever had to call 911, now that I think about it. Seeing these articles sounds like they are at least aware of it and it's an issue for them in training.

A

Re:recent article about that

[binford2k]

Would you rather be dead or treated rudely?

Seriously, they don't go out of their way to be rude, but they don't have time to dick around.

Use another phone

[Taimat]

We all learned this in our younger schooling... if your house is on fire, get out, and call from a another house's phone. Now, if it's vonage at the other house, then there's a problem....

WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

disclaimer: I work in the telecom field.

Vonage put the call on hold?? Or was it the 911 operator?
I wasn't aware Vonage operated 911 call centers. Do they have SLAs with emergency responders?
If Vonage [equipment] didn't answer the call, they were just providing the transport.

Next time the wife hangs up on me am I supposed to call Cingular and open a trouble ticket
for dropped calls on my cell phone?

Please.

Re:WTF?

[fishbowl]

>Vonage put the call on hold?? Or was it the 911 operator?

The premise of the story is that Vonage did, presumably in the process of routing the call to the localized 911. They have to do some processing, in order to provide localized 911 at all, and they had to be dragged kicking and screaming into compliance.

The discussion board is light on details, and in particular, the questions I'd ask as a juror aren't even approached. Was this a delay between the CO and the 911 call center? How did the route trace at the time of the call, in terms of the customer's broadband connection, and in terms of the voip packets? When was the 911 call initiated? When was it received by Vonage? What are the specific details of the handling of that call, timestamped logs please. If Vonage can't provide that information, as a juror I'd be willing to impose bankrupting fines against the company and recommend criminal prosecutions for the people who knew or should have known that this system could fail.

On the other hand, if the company can demonstrate due diligence, and especially if they can show that the same hold time would have resulted from a landline 911 call terminated at the same CO, then I'd find for the company. Either way, the homeowner has no fault. Any insurance company that tried to dismiss a claim because the homeowner used Vonage for 911, should lose.

Re:WTF?

[fishbowl]

There's more to the story. Part of it, left out of the current version, is that when the firefighters and police arrived, they had to chase him through the house to get him to exit (TWICE), and had to restrain him in handcuffs to keep him out. That might have hampered firefighting efforts more than the phone hold time did.

Re:WTF?

[The Cisco Kid]

Vonage wasn't forced into making 911 available. The FCC had to force the monoply telco's to permit Vonage (and other VOIP providers) access to the 911 trunks so they could provide it at all. Vonage (as do most voip providers) make it fairly clear that 911 over a voip line IS NOT RELIABLE. If your power is out, or your broadband is out, you get no phone at all, let alone 911. Relying on a voip line for 911 service is absolutely and completely stupid and moronic.

PARENT IS A TROLL

[Lehk228]

a real firefighter would never suggest throwing flour onto a fire, flour explodes when thrown into flame

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[Kadin2048]

Well it might put the fire out, come to think about it -- sorta like putting out a burning oil well with dynamite?

I just don't think it's exactly the "recommended method" of fighting a grease fire in one's own kitchen.

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[Diag]

the "recommended method" of fighting a grease fire

I always thought you were supposed to use one of those "fire blankets". Failing that, I guess a wet "normal" blanket would do the trick.

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[Anonymous Coward]

It doesn't exactly explode, especially if poured instead of thrown. For a grease fire, the flour will congeal on the top of the grease and help cutoff the air supply (go look up saponification - that's how the dry chem extinguishers work on grease fires). Problem is that you need a lot of flour to cover the whole burning surface and you risk getting burned trying it. It's better to simply put the lid on the pot. Here's some real advice from a fire department. http://www.casperfire.com/fire_prevention/fp_greas efiresafety/grease_fire_safety.htm

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[HuguesT]

A fire blanket is the recommended way. That's a non-combustible cloth blanket about 10feet square with handles. It sits folded in a sturdy container, metal or cloth, affixed to the wall. You pull on the handles, that causes the blanket to unfold, and then you put it on the fire.

Works great. Much better than an extinguisher for most fires.

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[harryk]

Well, I cannot speak specifically for the flour peice (although I have no reason to doubt you) ... we always trained people to simply cover the pan with its lid, or atleast a lid close enough in size, as in remove the air from the equation, and you can typically better control the blaze or quite possibly fully extinguish.

I wouldn't say that the parent is a troll, atleast not completely. I am also a firefighter, and one thing that I know for sure is that there is plenty of machismo, especially when being an interior firefighter (our department was an extremely aggressive group of 'fighters) ... at any rate, this machismo has put a number of our rookies in harms way, far too often, because they were trying to keep up with some of the veterans of the department.

At any rate, all I can say is that I agree with the part of him saying that a number of firefighters die with their head planted firmly (and quite deeply) in their ass. What I have found most commonly, is that the typical firefighter (especially in big city) only cares about collecting a check, and most aren't properly trained to begin with, and there are a HUGE number of people that I would never follow in.

I've fought my share, and I can tell you there are exactly 4 people I would completely trust my life with. One recently passed, leaving the other 3. I can tell you at the same time, that of those 3 only 2 are (in my opinion) adequately trained, the third just knows when enough is enough.

I respect fire, and I think that fire respects me, I've been fortunate to only fall victim to a bad situation once, and once was enough to learn some valuable lessons... ok I just realized that I'm beginning to ramble... -nuff said...

harryk

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[ivan256]

Flour, like most things that explode due to combustion, is only explosive if mixed with of oxygen in a narrow range of concentration. A big handful of flour won't explode. You should be glad that it won't or kitchens with gas stoves would be blowing up every time somebody made a cream sauce.

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[TheCarp]

So ok, you seem to know a thing or two here, you say you have fought a few.

I posted a few mins ago about my experience with smoke detectors. Namely that they have proven too sensitive in my house. Seriously small amounts of smoke from cooking, not even so much that the food tasted burn mind you, often from making a few grilled cheeses... theres often enough in the air by the 3rd one or so to set off the smoke detectors.

Since our detectors are linked, that means everyone gets woken up if its say... some drunken 3am, god please help us avoid the hangover food. Common in houses full of mid-20s guys.

After we had all lived together maybe 8 or 9 months, we decided to just remove the smoke detectors from the kitchen and the next room over.

Why?

Simple... nobody even got out of bed anymore for them. There were just so many false alarms. Is there anything that can be done about issues like this. I would love to have smoke detectors especially around the kitchen.... what does one do abou tthis?

-Steve

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[yarbo]

At my place (and my old place, and my parents' place) there's a microwave over the stove with an exhaust vent. I turn it on if I'm going to fry something. You may also have a window in/near the kitchen.

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[TheCarp]

sigh.... you would have to bring that up

Bit of a sore subject with me :)

See my roomate and I bought this place from his father. We indeed have a microwave with hood above our stove. It is supposed to vent outside.

Aparently sometime after the place was remodeled there was a problem with the microwave and it had to be dismounted...

Thats when it was realised that it was just mounted in front of a hole cut in the wall. It just vented right into the wall.

Sometimes, you just can't win.

-Steve

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[harryk]

Thats an excellent question, and from experience I have found that there are two potential determining factors.

First, as detectors go, there are a number of different ones, and different processes that they each might use. Some are heat, some are smoke, some are CO, some are laser sighted (smoke gets in laser, then alarm) etc... Generally speaking the detecting peice can (and often does) wear out, often signalling false positives. We're not talking 6months (although I guess its possible?) we're talking over years. You always hear to check the detector battery every 6 months, but aside from testing the alert tone, there isn't an active way to actually test the detector itself. Obviously some are better than others, but its hard to say that any one is the best. What I'm getting at is that some are 'better' at detecting than others, which does not necessarily mean more accurate. Any one sensor could be overly sensitive and thus cause false positives. I would say that if the existing detector is over 2 years old, replace it all together.

The 2nd possibility is simply age, following on with my previous thought. It is possible to erode the detecting capabilities of a given sensor (atleast in theory) so that it doesn't respond properly. IE, if you guys are always smoking, it is possible for the sensor to accept that X level of smoke in the air is acceptable, but X plus the very slight smoke given off from cooking is over the top. False positive. Another example would be if you guys are ALWAYS frying foods, there becomes an eventual film of oil and grease on everything (yes everything) and that could be causing an issue, but you guys would literally have to be frying even the ice cream your eating as an after dinner snack...

My recommendation is to first and foremost re-install the smoke detectors, regardless of the annoyance that it might cause... I can assure you that even if you ignore the alarm sound, you're body will atleast acknowledge its presence, add to that a smell of smoke and the body WILL react properly. A tip, is to place the smoke detectors on the wall, at the highest spot, its actually a more accurate spot than the ceiling. Also, maybe place them slightly further away from the kithen area, I've got ours placed in the common area in-front of each bedroom.

Also, one thing you can always do, is call the fire department, and have them come inspect your home. Most departments will do this free of charge, other might charge, or ask for a donation, and just have them check your systems...

Good luck!

harryk

Re:PARENT IS A TROLL

[Lehk228]

I am suprised that the kitchen detector was networked with the rest, usually they are not specifically for that reason. if you can find one get a networked Fire detector for the kitchen and have the kitchen smoke detector be a stand alone unit.

I don't know if you can get a fire only detector anymore.

999 to get non-emergency back-up

[Netscryer]

And in the UK... http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/08/govt_numbe r/ "Around seven in ten calls to the 999 service are not deemed to be emergencies, thus clogging up the system and making it harder for staff to handle urgent calls. Which is why the government wants a new Single Non-Emergency Number (SNEN). The new SNEN service - 101 - will be used for people to report matters such as vandalism, graffiti, and noisy neighbours." (I think 999, 911 and 112 are equivalent in the UK, but 999 is most familiar to most people, I've only ever dialed 999 though.)

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[Russ Nelson]

Yeah, I had a similar situation. I fell on my bicycle and tore open one knee and got serious road rash on the other. I got a ride to the hospital from the department secretary (again, hooray for secretaries). You should have seen how white her face got when I walked into her office. I was bleeding so badly that the blood had run down to my socks from the front of the building to her office. She quickly agreed that yes, I needed to go to the hospital. Got there, walked into the emergency room, and they didn't have anybody to see me right away. I said "Okay, this is bullshit! What if this was an actual emergency and I was like, you know, BLEEDING FREELY??", and walked a block to my best friend's house. His father is a doctor. He stitched me up, right as rain.

Re:Not important.

[aevan]

"Please hold..."

*sound of running feet and car engine starting

DON'T try this

[Chris Pimlott]

The last thing we need is for 911 system to get /. by a bunch of geeks so they can smugly post how crappy 911 is.,,

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[terrymr]

Once called the local non-emergency response number to report a drunk guy fallen down in the street with an apparent broken nose. After they asked my if he was violent to which I answered "No, he's just sitting there" they transferred me to 911.

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[zippthorne]

Don't you have a phone book? They should be in the "blue pages"

be safe

[pg133]

12 Top Safety Tips
Chip pan fires cause more injuries from fire in your home than anything else.

Do cellphones make it worse

[grahamsz]

I've called 911 in the US exactly once, and i was put on hold for about 2 minutes and then transferred to a non-local 911 department who didn't really know where i was or what i was reporting.

This was in what appeared to be a really serious accident. A full size van literally flew across a 6 lane intersection because the driver didn't notice his lane had ended. This was in the afternoon rush hour and it seems like a miracle that no-one was hit.

However i suspect about 50 vehicals saw the accident and i'm sure some decent percentage of them dialled 911 immediately. I'm not sure how many 911 operators are standing by, but i doubt it's enough to cope with the influx of calls in that situation. As a result, people with perhaps more legitimate emergencies would struggle to get through.

Maybe once the 911 locator stuff gets off the ground, the system could automatically deprioritize calls coming from the same location as those already being answered.

Re:Do cellphones make it worse

[innocent_white_lamb]

the system could automatically deprioritize calls coming from the same location as those already being answered.
 
That could be really dangerous.
 
How does you calling in the fire across the street help me when I'm having a heart attack at the same time in my living room 100 feet away?

Re:Do cellphones make it worse

[grahamsz]

That's a fair observation but i think that this sort of system would be benificial in the majority of cases and detrimental in a few.

As it is now, if 10 people call in a fire across the street at the same time as you so inconveniently choose to suffer cardiac arrest, then your call will likely be on hold for a minute or so (given my limited experience of this sort of situation).

However right now, you'll be equally disadvantaged if you are somewhere else in the city.

If we could geographically deprioritize calls then you might find yourself in the same situation with the fire across the street, but you'll be much better off if the fire is elsewhere, since you could jump in front of fire callers 2 through 9.

I'm absolutely not suggesting that 911 calls not be answered, and in an ideal world they'd all be answered by real humans on the first ring. But if that isn't realistic then we have to pick and choose the order when high call volume occurs.

Homer: Operator? Give me the number for 911!

[pepax]

Homer: Operator? Give me the number for 911!

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[Detritus]

In many places, if you call that number, assuming you can find it, they'll tell you to call 911, since all dispatching is handled through 911.

You idiot fuck

[lorcha]

Do not, under any circumstances, put any powder in your kitchen on a grease fire, except for baking soda. Double especially do not fucking put flour on any fire.

You dumb fuck. You could get somebody killed.

If you have a kitchen fire, some good things to try are:

1. Putting a lid on the pot and turning off the heat (if it's small)
2. Putting it out with a fire blanket
3. Putting it out with an A/B/C fire extinguisher
4. Putting it out with baking soda

Re:You idiot fuck

[lucifuge31337]

Actually, you want a type "K" in your kitchen these days. They are primarily wet-chemical extinguishers that are designed to properly work with the types of cooking greases likely to be on a stove these days.

Yes, I'm a fire marshal (part time....small town). And not to defind the guy who claims to be a firefighter, I have to say that most firefighters don't know jack about fire safety. As a firefighter, you get there after its already too late, and put wet stuff on red stuff. Which is the whole reason I got into the fire marshal's office.....you actually get to to prevention.

Re:You idiot fuck

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Actually I'm willing to bet massive amounts of salt would work as well. It's a fine enough powder to soak up the grease, it's a mineral so it won't burn, and table salt is a fine enough grain to pack down and cut off the oxygen to the fire (which is basically what the baking soda does as well).

Why would you call from a house that's on fire?

[Overzeetop]

That's sort of the point - if your house is on fire, the first thing you do is get out. You don't grab anything or make a phone call. You call from next door or on your cell.

Fire Department Hold Music

[SeanDuggan]

Not entirely the same situation, but a similar thing happened to a friend of mine while we were in college. At the career placement center, where he worked, a wastebasket caught on fire, so they called 911. And got routed to Public Safety, the college's security office. And were immediately put on hold. By the time the dispatcher got back to them, someone had put out the fire.

As regards some of the people commenting in the thread quoted above that there was likely substantial delay in the dialing of 911, consider also that, under stress, it can take people a fair amount of time just to get those three digits right. In an emergency, most people get fairly clumsy with fine motor movements, one of those reasons that those personal safety devices can be pretty useless in a mugging situation unless you've trained yourself over and over again to pull it out without having to think about it.

Re:Fire Department Hold Music

[Penguinfrog]

It is the freakin internet ! your gunna have a unstable phone regardless of what you do, no different than the possibility of land lines going down, when you purchase a voip phone you are taking that risk, only an Idiot could not envision that scenario. And where were this guys neighbors? Could he have not ran next door and alerted somone with a land line, somehow I doubt noone else in the neighborhood had no cell, no land line, or anything. The bottom line to this story is this guy is an IDIOT. Vonage should not have any responsibility for this.

Dial 911 and Die

[BenEnglishAtHome]

(No links provided because I'm at work and "Weapons" sites are filtered.)

Google for "Dial 911 and Die" and you'll find some interesting case studies by Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership. Their point is that that you should be able to own guns because dialing 911 will frequently not produce a fast enough response to prevent a tragedy. The broader point is that 911 is surprisingly (to most people) unreliable. Generally, when you have a true emergency of the "We need help in two minutes or less or someone's going to die" sort, you're on your own.

Back before 911 when I was a kid, I was listening to music in my bedroom when I heard my mother scream. As I walked down the hall, I saw her trying to dial the phone while the entire top of the cooktop was engulfed in four feet of flames from a grease fire. I walked in, pulled her out of my path, opened the pantry, stuck my thumb into the side of a new box of baking soda, ripped the top clean off, stuck my arm into the fire, and vigorously shook all the powder out of the box over the fire. Then I turned off the burners and told my mom "I put it out; you clean it up."

I was back in my room and listening to music again in 90 seconds, 2 minutes, tops.

If I'd been stupid enough to rely on 911, the house would have burned down. It's amazing to me how many people don't realize that they need to be at least a little self-sufficient.

Re:Dial 911 and Die

[stryker115]

Man, with reflexes and dry humor like that, you could be James Bond!

Re:Dial 911 and Die

[virg_mattes]

That's a great story, right up until the part where more than half of them end, which is you shaking the box of baking soda into the fire, but the fire doesn't go out. Not calling 911 because you expect to fix it yourself is just as stupid, for exactly the same reasons, as calling 911 and doing nothing else. Smart folks call 911 and then put the phone down and deal with the fire. That way, if the fire doesn't go out when your box of baking soda is empty, you don't end up in deep trouble because nobody knows the house is on fire.

Contingency plans are everything in a fire. By the way, next time you might consider hanging around the room for another few minutes to be sure the fire doesn't flare back up. And you should also consider using better manners with your mother, but then I suppose that's her job to fix.

Virg

Re:Dial 911 and Die

[BenEnglishAtHome]

Many excellent points. Allow me to address a few.

shaking the box of baking soda into the fire, but the fire doesn't go out.

I had two more giant boxes of baking soda in the pantry, as well as a fire extinguisher. I grabbed the box first only because it was the solution that could be deployed most quickly.

Smart folks call 911 and then put the phone down and deal with the fire.

I'm old. My original post specifies that this was in the days before 911 service existed. While I was dealing with the fire, my Mom was paging through a directory and hitting "0" on the phone. If the fire had continued, she was working on the next step.

you might consider hanging around the room for another few minutes

I thought of that. Then I figured my Mom would let me know if it flared again. Also, I wanted her to know that I knew she could handle it from there. (See below for more.)

you should also consider using better manners with your mother, but then I suppose that's her job to fix

I gave her a hug as I left.

Actually, there's more to it. Since this is one of the few cases in life where I think I did exactly right, I'll explain. This happened very soon after my father died. Mom was an emotional wreck. She was depressed and her self-confidence was at a low ebb. She badly needed to know that I could take care of her. She badly needed to know that she could take care of herself. When she accidentally started this fire, I could see her look of utter helplessness. This was the sort of thing that could put her over the edge if it were any big deal. Now, normally any house fire IS a big deal, but as I walked to the kitchen I realized it was imperative I treat this whole incident as a mere trifle. By being cavalier about it, I assured her it was no big deal, she wasn't a screw-up, and it could happen to anybody. By offhandedly assuming she would clean up and handing off the situation to her, I demonstrated my confidence in her to take control. By being blase' in the moment, I showed her that even if something bad started to happen, she could rely on me to handle it.

I realize this all seems strange but I found the situation highly stressful. When I turned the corner from my room into the hallway, all I saw was a mass of flames framed in the opening ahead of me. I nearly freaked out; I was so stressed that time seemed to slow down (and this was long before I had ever heard of tachypsychia.) But during those four or five long steps from my room to the kitchen, I vividly remember consciously assessing her state of mind based on how she was moving and her facial expressions and then deliberately formulating a plan to make the entire situation as stress-free as possible for her.

To an observer, it would have looked rude. To her, as she told me later, it was one of those incidents that gives a person hope they can overcome their circumstances no matter what life throws at them. Her confidence in me, in herself (because I had confidence in her), and in the future got a perfectly timed and sorely needed boost from the incident.

Personally, I think this was the first time she ever saw me as fully adult and I think she was shocked. It was a good shock, to be sure, but it was also a turning point for the better in our relationship and solidified our mutual respect that had been battered by recent circumstances.

Side benefit - To live up to my demonstrated confidence in her, she cleaned the hell out of that kitchen. :-)

Pragmatic reasons behind it

[nanter]

I work in EMS.

The reason they do this is because the infrastructure is designed to appropriately classify and route fire, EMS, and police calls to the appropriate resources. When you call a non-emergency number, you get someone who does not have access to the dispatch system and someone who is not able to determine what resources (police cars, ambulances, fire trucks, etc) are available to dispatch to handle that particular situation. They advise you to hang up and call 911 because the 911 operator will be able to hand your situation off to a dispatcher that will allocate the appropriate resources to the call and will then mark those resources as unavailable for other calls.

There really is a method behidn the madness - just a single point of contact for coordination of resources.

Scare tactics.

[puddnhead7]

I wonder how much SBC/ATT and Verizon have spent making sure this BS story keeps getting dredged up. Cowboy Neal is either a sucker or a stooge for posting this.

Interesting

[lorcha]

Thanks for the response. I had never heard of type K extinguishers, and it took a fair amount of googling to find out anything about it. Apparently, this "K" designation has only existed since 1998, and extinguishers of that type are rare.

Personally, I'm not going to rush out and purchase one. I'm happy with my A/B/Cs for the following reason: I am not a firefighter, I do not extinguish fires on a daily, monthly, or even yearly basis, therefore, I do not want to create a situation where there is a fire in my home, and I have to try to select the proper extinguisher in a panic.

If something's on fire, the last thing I want to have to do is say, "Oh, the garbage can is on fire. Better go find my class A extinguisher... wherever I put that one." Or "Oh, gee whiz, my cooking oil caught on fire. Better go find my class B (or K) extinguisher... wherever I put that one." Or, "Yowsers! This is an electrical fire. I better go find my class C extinguisher... wherever I put that one."

See where I'm going with this one? I like A/B/C for its point, yank, and shoot operation. If there is a fire, I don't trust myself to correctly ascertain the type of fire, determine which is the correct extinguisher, locate it, and then use it before my house gets torched. I want to just "shoot the base of the red stuff with the fire extingusiher thingy", run like a scared rabbit, and let the professionals handle the situation from there.

Thanks again for letting me know about the class K. Always good to learn about new(ish) things.

Re:Interesting

[CharlieG]

Biggest problem is that most people don't even HAVE a fire extinguisher at ALL - or if they do, that have some little 8oz job burried in the back of some closet somewhere

I prefer at least 1 10lb'er on each floor of the house, plus a 5lber in the kitchen, plus one in the garage (that's in addition to the 10 lb'ers)

Re:Interesting

[lucifuge31337]

Most of the new "kitchen sized" extinguishers are actually K's now....but its just not advertised as such. Yes, and ABC will probably work fine....but the K's are really great to have if you leave them by the stove where you're like to grab it if there's a grease fire.

ABC extinguishers just coat it with greenish, really nasty tasting (don't ask) powder. Type K's saponify the grease, just like those expensive commercial kitchen hood systems (actually, that's where these came from.....in the mid 90s, they replaced the agent in these hoods to deal with the newer high temperature greases restaurants are using as the old agent didn't really saponify peanut oil and the like properly...this new stuff does).

But I agree with you ont he simplicity of the ABC.....I see it as a matter of location. You hang the K int he kitchen (yes, it will still knock down other types of fires...just not as effectively) and the ABC somewhere else. Most people who actually have home extinguishers knock a fire down with the closest one and then proceed to unload every last extinguisher in the house on it anyway......so if you're like most people, you'd eventually get around to the proper type.

911?

[EricX2]

Carl: "Oh, and don't bother calling 911 any more...here's the _real_number." [hands Homer a card with "912"]

Re:Who needs 911?

[JBHarris]

Plug a phone into your wall outlet, or if you have a spare disconnected cell phone, keep it charged and make sure your family knows where it is. 911 service works on any phone line in the U.S. even if the service is not activated.

Total nonsense. I live in an apartment (BellSouth Services the complex). I never activated my 'land-line' because I use a cell-phone. I do however have an old, standard phone mounted onto the wall-jack (it is about shoulder high, in the kitchen) to cover the ugly connector. If I pick up that phone, I don't get dial-tone, the phone's lights (behind the keypad) do not even work.

Telling me that dialing 911 will work from that phone is total non-sense. I'd have just as much luck dialing it from my daughter's Barbie Fun-Fone.

Chattanooga Choo-Choo

[tachyon13]

Oddly enough CNN has this article: http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/03/24/tennessee.911.ap/ index.html "Thousands of calls to Chattanooga's 911 call center have been going unanswered, according to records examined after a caller was unable to report a kitchen fire because three of four dispatchers were taking breaks at the same time."

"X" alarm fire.

[Stephen Samuel]

I've seen a 2 alarm fire. They were hosing down the house next door Trying to keep it from bursting into flames, and evacuating the residents. They were also evacuating the next two houses over, just in case, Two cars parked out on the street were, well, toasted.

I agree that, if this guy was bouncing around the house, grabbing computers, it was no 5-alarm fire at that time (or any other time), and he was probably wasting precious time that could have helped save part of the house.

And if his music was important enough to risk his life on, he would have been better off making backups and sticking it in a safety deposit box. An external drive and a safety deposit box are far cheaper than 2 days in hospital for smoke inhalation or the fines he probably received for risking the lives of the officials who chased him thru the house. That should have been the lesson for him to take away from this fiasco. Precisely what happened with Vonage putting him on hold is a bit of a side show compared to that.

911 use to hang up on my daughter too

[cdn-programmer]

This happened frquently and I had to teach her to just be persistant and keep phoning until they listened. Her mom was very ill. Crap like this does happen and often they don't get it right.

Re:Should have tested it as soon as he installed i

[Kalak]

Excellent idea, but if you don't know the 911 Dispatch Manager, how would one go about scheduling a test 911 call? (I'm actually thinking of the educational possibilities for my kids, since I don't have VoIP.)

a bit of a moron

[homebrewmike]

> Anybody who only has Vonage without some form of backup line
> (either a bare bones land line or a cell phone) is a bit of
> a moron anyway- what would he have done if a candle lit the
> drapes on fire during a power outage?

Back in the day, when Grandpa bought the first cordless phone I ever saw, I seem to recall that he was required to have a hardline phone on the premissis. Of course, that was back in the day when AT&T was Ma Bell and kind of cared if one died - or was at least regulated to care.

Now, there might be a day when VOIP is really a complete mesh network - WIFI is common enough that if your net connections are down, you just use your neighbors, or your car uplinks to the spy sat.

Hmm, if one wants to be really safe, one would have:
1) A land line
2) VOIP
3) Cell Phone
4) A 2m HT with DTMF and a connection to the local autopatch

And if one wants to be even safer, have fire-proof curtains and live in a cement house. ;)

RTFA + false assumption considered harmful ...

[Zero__Kelvin]

" He was in the house because he was on hold. It said so, right in the summary."

Unless this is actually 2006 ... a time when there is both VoIP and Cordless phones/Wireless headsets ... then your assumtion is absurd ;-)

(RTFA == good); (assume_without_thinking == bad);

HAND ....

Where there is smoke...

[Efialtis]

There may not be fire...

We are told, when getting Vonage, that 911 service may not be available
A: If the internet goes down
B: If the power goes out

Then there is the difference between E911 and 911...

I think several people have already commented that you should keep Fire/Police/Ambulance on the SPEED DIAL as well as 911.
Just about every week you see or read a story about a 911 operator hanging up on someone or getting facts wrong, or a disconnect on the line.
We aren't helpless, and that is all 911 has done for us. We rely on it instead of thinking for ourselves...

Then Cell Phones, well, they have a worse reputation than Vonage with 911. You call, and some operator MIGHT answer, if you have signal...
And if there is the "general" operator, they will want to know what city you are in so they can TRANSFER you to that locality.
Then you have to know the address or close intersection or mile marker...

If you ask me, this will be blown up to make Vonage look bad, but in reality, the 911 service is more relaible via POTS or VoIP than it is on a cell phone.

Here was my cell phone 911 call:
Operator 1: 911 what is the emergency?
Me: A van is starting on fire, there is lots of smoke
Operator 1: what city are you in?
Me: Kirkland, Washington...
Operator 1: Would you like to be connected to Kirkland 911?
Me: um, sure...
(now the van has erupted into flame)
Operator 2: 911 what is your emergency?
Me: A van is burning in the parking lot...
Operator 2: would you like to be connected to Kirkland Fire Department?
Me: uh, sure...
(flames have now engulfed the entire engine area, the fuel line has ruptured and gass is burning in puddles under the van)
Operator 3: Kirkland Fire Department, is this an emergency call?
Me: yes, there is a van burning in the parking lot, it might explode
Operator 3: Please call 911
Me: I did, they sent me to you
Operator 3: Where are you located
Me: (address)
Operator 3: Ok, we will dispatch a unit to your location...

Bruce Willis

[Sigg3.net]

Wait, wait, I've seen this one!
It's because the "terrorist" has wired the fake bomb at the primary school so that it responds to police communication frequencies. But then someone puts it in the news and 911 gets totally overloaded with traffic from worried parents. Like a ddos.
I suspect 50-60% would just have to hold in such a situation.
They're gonna have to wait anyway, till that fat guy with the glasses finds out that it's just a fake one. The real one is one that tanker where the gold - supposedly - is.
But Bruce Willis knows better.

You get what you pay for...

[deviantphil]

IIRC, Vontage users don't pay a 911 taxation fee. Therefore, they do not pay to operate the 911 centers. I think this is a situation of you get what you pay for. Governments have to fund the 911 service, and they have rightfully decided to do so with a standard phone line tax.

I agree with you about salt

[lorcha]

I think you're right about salt, that it would work as well. However, we're talking about an emergency situation here. I think it's better to tell people "put baking soda on the fire" rather than "put baking soda, or salt, or $foo, or ..." and count on someone to make a good decision in a panic. Was I supposed to put on salt or sugar? Baking soda or baking powder? Or was it cream of tartar, altogether? Remember, you've got to act swiftly, and the wrong decision could easily make things much worse in a hurry.

That's why I like to tell my tenants simple things to remember. "Here's the fire extinguisher. Pull the pin, point the hose at the base of the flames, then squeeze. If the fire is still going and the extinguisher ain't, then get the hell out and call 911 from the neighbor's or a cellphone. My landlord's insurance policy doesn't cover your belongings, so get yourself renter's insurance. It's cheap."

Re:I agree with you about salt

[Marxist Hacker 42]

Still, would be an interesting backyard experiment- light some grease on fire and dump salt on it.

I hate vonage

[CottonThePirate]

I know this is a little off topic, but just wanted to rant. Vonage has horrible policies, they claim no contract, but their is a $39.99 fee plus tax! to cancel. I got rid of them for just a cell and they were rude and charged this fee to cancel. I remember when it didn't cost money to stop getting a service. Save yourself some hassle and pass on Vonage.

Or, Do the Right Experiment...

[virg_mattes]

Instead, how about you set up a pan full of grease on a cinder block, light it on fire, and then use a pole with a coffee can tied to the end to dump flour on it.

We did it. It put the fire out. It didn't explode.

Carry on.

Virg

Flour *IS* better than water

[Stephen Samuel]

Flour? you sure you want to be throwing fine powdered carbohydrates on a fire?

I wouldn't be at all surprised if a knowledgeable instructor said (sarcastically) "You'd be better off throwing flour", knowing that flour could ultimately become a fuel. Then trainee misunderstands the sarcasm as "Flour is a really good idea".

Now, one thing I'd say is that throwing flour from 5 feet away would creat a nice fine mist of fuel that military types call FAE (Fuel/Air Explosive). Bad, bad news.

On the other hand, pouring a couple of kilos of flower from a foot or two away would attack the two primary methods of stopping a fire:

1. cool the fuel. If you have more flour than grease, the flour will cool the grease -- probably below the burning point. At this point, you have the ability to move the pan from the burner... (further cooling the fire).
   When flour hits hot grease, there's a chemical reaction that takes place (first step for making cream sauces). This reaction is probably endothermic, which would further cool the fuel.

   Strangely this is actually how placing a lid on the pot helps to put out a fire... It removes the exothermic ("hot") fuel-air interface point from the surface of the grease, thus slowing down the feedback loop of heating the grease from both top and bottom -- now you just need to get the bottom of the grease away from the hot burner....

2. deprive it of oxygen (or -- to put it another way, deprive the oxygen of flame-temperature fuel. The flour will congeal and cut down on the spattering of the grease which gives a nice fuel-air interface. It can also cover the surface of the grease (before it sinks) -- once again depriving the fuel of it's oxygen (or vice versa).

Water, on the other hand, will just instantly expand into steam, and toss grease into the air -- in a fine mist of flame-temperature fuel. When that hits the air, instead of cooling, it will light on fire which will further heat nearby droplets ..... Another FAE situation -- not to mention the large globs of (near) burning grease that will probably cover your body.

So, he's not completely out to lunch -- but I'd say that if you have an ABC or K fire extinguisher on hand, or just a lid (or another, larger pan), that's probably a better solution ... Just remember... Never put water on an oil/grease/gasoline fire.

Last point: Firefighters walk into these kinds of fires with equipment that goes well beyond choosing between flour and baking soda. If it gets to the point where a (fully suited) firefighter is choosing between flour and baking soda to put out a fire, (s)he's probably also wondering about whether his/her last will and testament is up to date. I seriously doubt that they get in-depth training about the nuances of using common kitchen ingredients as firefighting tools.

Re:This should surprise no one (911 horror stories

[ShakaUVM]

A fight broke out between a British guy and a store clerk at Ralph's a little past midnight. All the Ralph's employees were beating on him, the British guy's friends came in... it wasn't pretty. Those of us customers who weren't involved in the fight were dailing 911, and all of us got put on hold when we called. After 15 minutes, one of us got in so I don't know how long we could have waited.

If my house had been burning down, I'd have been mighty upset at being placed on hold for 15.

Just use your cellphone

[singingjim]

Cellphones work fine for 911. Vonage warns everyone when they sign up that their 911 isn't your ordinary, garden variety 911. I would never use my Vonage for 911 unless it was my only option. Luckily, alarm companies require a landline so I have an old phone hooked up just for such an emergency. The unlimited long distance is just too good to pass up when you and your living-in-sin girlfriend's families live a thousand miles away. Man, that girl can talk.

Re:Should have tested it as soon as he installed i

[911Pro]

If you do not know who the head of dispatch is, just call the local PD or Sheriff's office and ask who they are. Titles run from Director to Supervisor, but if you say dispatch and 911 testing, they will know. On a related note, they would be more than happy to allow it.

Obligatory Billy Madison quote

[Dark_Gravity]

That's why you can [supposedly] connect a phone to a jack with no service and dial 911

"...what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever heard...Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it."

A phone jack with no service will have no dial tone or talk battery, and is incapable of dialing anything, even 911!

Re:Obligatory Billy Madison quote

[Bacon Bits]

Obviously, you didn't see LoRdTAW's comment immediately below yours.

Re:Learn to WRITE you tool

[NumberGod]

"so I can use that to make people think I things"

Yep, you're right, it's hardly even english, is it?

I don't 'try to make people' do anything.

I'm just trying to help keep you all alive. Idiots and all.

I just offer advice, you're quite entitled to ignore it if you wish. It worrys me, not at all.

And, yes, it is acceptable to qualify any advice you give with references as to how accurate it may be. Quite unlike. "Hey d000dz, smoke waaakes u up!!!!!!"

I don't need to impress people with my qualifications. I'm happy with my life.

Oh, and bonus points points for posting AC. Still working on growing that spine huh?

Oppps, there I go with all that fancy doctor talk again.

My 911 Works Fine

[jasontromm]

I went on Vonage's web site, followed their directions to make sure my address was in the correct database. I then called 911 from my phone, told them it was not an emergency and asked them to verify the address I was calling from. They gave me back my address right away. No problem.

Calling 911 from home....

[BMIComp]

I'm sorry, but when I was a kid the firefighters always used to tell us to leave the house, make sure that everyone is out, and then have a neighbor call 911. Had he done this, he probably would have had time to come back and rescue his computer.

I understand that this may not apply in situations where it is a rural location and your closest neighbor lives a couple of miles away, but looking at his house from google maps... it seems like this is not the case.

Re:Who needs 911?

[HappyDrgn]

Total nonsense.
 
I pick up my phone, I dial 911 and it works. I've done it before in an emergency, at this house (Quest) and my previous house (Verizon). I learned about it from a friend with VoIP, who's local carrier was Pacbell. Maybe your phone is broken, or maybe your ILEC just does not give a shit, I suppose you could be a liar too...

Re:Should have tested it as soon as he installed i

[gujo-odori]

I've been using Packet8 for over a year now, and have had very few (and none recent) sound quality problems. I've never tested 911, but they are going to introduce a number (933) for people using Packet8 to call that will verify their 911 info.

One thing I do recommend for people who are using a VoIP service, is that you have a dedicated UPS for your phone (if it requires AC power; mine does), cable or DSL modem, and router. I have one, and when we had a power outage of over three hours recently when multiple transformers in this area failed, I had phone service throughout.

For that matter, even if you have a POTS line, if your phone requires AC power to work, put it on a UPS. A small one will do, and it could save your life some day.