The 112 telephone service in Valencia went down during the afternoon of October 29 due to a breakdown linked to a system update that had been causing problems for days. The employees had reported it repeatedly, according to what four workers and a senior person in charge of the service told elDiario.es.
On October 30, the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, described as a “hoax” the information circulating about a 112 fall on the day of the storm. On November 11, the vice president, Susana Camarero, limited herself to attributing the failure to a high volume of calls. They both lied.
On the fateful afternoon of the flood, while the water engulfed various Valencian municipalities, hundreds of people tried to contact 112 to report incidents. The workers of this service, however, often found themselves unable to speak with the citizens who called them.
“Calls came in and we listened to the other person, but they didn’t listen to us,” recalls a worker about the situation during that fateful afternoon, in which more than two thousand calls came in in one hour. “You had to hang up and call the person again, but most of the time we couldn’t talk to them because they were trying to contact us again and had gotten in line again.”
Other workers interviewed describe a similar situation but in reverse: “It also happened that we did not hear the person who was calling,” says Anastasio Borreguero, one of the service coordinators who was there on October 29. The rest of those interviewed have requested anonymity to comment on the situation.
The employees consulted indicate that they had been warning about this breakdown for days. “There comes a time when you get tired of notifying that this is happening,” describes one of the interviewees. “When an update of this type is made, the following days we communicate the failures so that the Communications Systems Department can correct them,” says Borreguero, who specifies that it is something “common” when there are this type of updates.
Those interviewed agree that, after the update and with the failures that were being reported, the high volume of calls was the final straw for the system to completely collapse. According to the minutes of the meeting of the Emergency Coordination Center, Cecopi, published by elDiario.es, between October 29 and November 1 – in four days of DANA – 112 received 75,000 calls.
Ilunion, the company that manages 112, did not want to make any comments to elDiario.es. This newspaper has also requested its version from Emergencies and, although it has processed the question, at the close of this edition it had not been able to collect the requested information, which includes the incident reports.
“You could hear an echo”
The 112 workers were quick to recognize when this problem occurred on the call. “If you heard an echo when you picked up, it meant that the caller couldn’t hear what you were saying,” says another worker. To the long waiting time, which after 8:30 p.m. was more than nine minutes, the Valencians had to add that once they managed to get the call picked up they did not hear anyone on the other end of the phone.
The sources interviewed describe a chaotic afternoon in the emergency service managed by the subcontractor Ilunion. Both due to the accumulation of requests, with long waiting times, and due to the failure of the call reception system. “I’ve been working on this since 2001 and I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Borreguero.
Those responsible for the service designed what is known as an “extraordinary operation,” which usually occurs in situations in which a large volume of calls is expected. This operation represents a small change in the usual protocol to try to filter and prioritize the most urgent notices.
112 also requested the assistance of personnel from other departments or who were not scheduled to work that day and overtime was also assigned to other employees. From the usual 18-20 workers in the service, there were approximately 35-40 employees, according to the sources interviewed.
The overflow was such that some coordinators even began to pick up calls. 112 workers explain that this is not exceptional and occurs when there are peaks of work, but it is usually detrimental to the coordination of personnel.
“The Generalitat penalizes the company if calls are missed,” explains an employee. “On a busy day, the coordinators usually pick up the phone so that this does not happen, but this prevents them from doing their job, which is to coordinate the personnel based on the calls we receive.”
Borreguero, who works as coordinator, clarifies this aspect. “There came a time when it seemed like we were all doing everything,” he recalls. “It is true that some of us coordinators began to answer calls, but this does not mean that there was no one coordinating, some did stay doing that task.”
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