VANCOUVER — British Columbia's largest emergency call centre is wrapping up 2016 by releasing its annual top 10 list of reasons not to call 911.
E-Comm call-takers Jim Beland and Chris Faris say in a news release that too many people think of 911 as an information hotline rather than an emergency link to police, fire and ambulance services.
Beland and Faris each handled calls considered the most extreme examples of 911 misuse, with one fielding an inquiry about job opportunities with police and the other answering a request for help with a broken gym locker.
E-Comm offers other examples of calls that unnecessarily tied up emergency lines, ranging from a report of an electric shaver that would not turn off, to someone who was tired of waiting in traffic.
Requests for help getting a soccer ball off a roof, a drone out of a tree and a big spider out of a bathroom also make the 2016 top-10 list.
E-Comm handles about 1.35 million emergency calls annually from 25 cities, regional districts and other communities across B.C., while also providing call-taking and dispatch services to 35 police and fire departments in the southwestern part of the province.
"As call-takers, our job is to treat each call like an emergency until we can determine otherwise, and this takes time. We want our time reserved for people who need help because they have a legitimate emergency," Beland says in the release.
Faris says many calls to 911 begin with the caller saying 'this is not an emergency but ...,' and E-Comm urges those people to visit its website to find non-emergency numbers for police, fire and ambulance.
