61% of 9-1-1 calls in Costa Rica are not emergencies

QCOSTARICA — Daily Costa Rica’s 9-1-1 Emergency Service receives 13,000 calls. Of these, 61% are not real emergencies, which causes saturation of the lines and problems in being able to resolve those urgent calls.

Many of these calls are not false calls. Rather, they are accidental calls, especially those made by children who play with phones without adult supervision.

For this reason, the institution launched the campaign with the objective of reducing non-urgent calls and improving efficiency in the attention of real emergencies. The initiative seeks to educate the population on when it is appropriate to make a call to 9-1-1, thus ensuring that the service invests its time in attending to situations in which the life or private property of citizens is at risk.

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Tips for calling

The campaign aims to help people understand how to use the call system, so that the experience is the best for the user and that the rescue teams can correctly go to the place where an incident is reported.

9-1-1 first advises to stay calm. It is clear that an emergency scares people, but the best way for everything to go well is to stay calm.

Secondly, explain to the operator exactly what the emergency is. For this, it is vital that they can locate where it occurred. This is done first by saying what the province, canton and district are.

For foreigners, this can be a challenge if they have a limited knowledge of Spanish.

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Then comes the challenge of providing an address. Using reference points that can be a church, school, or square, among others, helps. It is also important to inform about the cardinal points from that reference point and the distance in meters or blocks.

In Costa Rica, 100 meters is commonly referred to as a block, 50 meters a 1/2 block, etc.

30 years of 9-1-1

The history of 9-1-1 begins in 1988, when the then Vice President, Jorge Manuel Dengo, presented to the National Emergency Commission (CNE) the possibility of creating a call service in the country.

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A year later, the then CNE heard, Humberto Trejos, took up the idea, but it was not until January 21, 1994, that Trejos and President Rafael Ángel Calderón Fournier signed the decree of the Single Alarm Center (9-1-1 Emergency System).

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