Girls Call For Help Via Facebook

Rather than calling for help via the emergency number 0-0-0, two Australian girls aged 10 and 12 messaged a friend on Facebook via their mobile phone to advise that they were stuck in a storm drain. Adelaide Metropolitan Fire Service officials expressed concern that the girls used Facebook, possibly delaying emergency responders rather than using the phone to call the emergency number.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/09/07/2678945.htm

We are finding more incidents of young people using the technology that they use for daily contact during emergencies. Everything from texting their parents from inside an overturned school bus, twittering during school code reds, and now facebook to call for help.

This poses two challenges; educating young people on the best and most direct way to access emergency assistance, and keeping up with the impacts that new technologies being released will have on emergencies.

At least one 9-1-1 centre in the USA is already accepting emergency calls via texting which is feasible as GPS locations of the cell phones accompany the text call.

Emergency communications centres in Canada, lacking GPS data, still have difficulting tracking down cell phone callers - and this is an issue that has been with us for more than a decade. How will regulatory bodies and emergency agencies address new technologies when they haven't caught up to old technologies?