After the failure of the operator Orange which affected the emergency telephone numbers, the firefighters want to reform the French alert system. – LIONEL URMAN / SIPA
Security actors want this incident to serve as a lesson. The National Federation of Firefighters of France (FNSPF) spoke less than 24 hours after the Orange outage which seriously disrupted emergency numbers on Wednesday evening. It advocates a single number dedicated to emergency calls, 112.
“In the end, our resilience requires a major renovation of our warning and communication system that the French firefighters have been asking for for a long time, expressed by the President of the Republic in 2017, and which could finally see the light of day if the Parliament understands that it is now necessary to avoid putting the urgent as well as the non-urgent in the same pipe ”, underlines the FNSPF in a press release. “Yes to 112 for the emergency”.
Need for modernization
This failure “once again shows the need for modernization in both infrastructural and organizational terms, taking into account new uses and IT tools: applications for smartphones, social networks, but also connected objects and emails must be taken into account to communicate the ‘alert,’ she adds. “With more than 18 million calls received by firefighters in France each year, and 1 intervention every 6.5 seconds, this failure tested the French warning system”, continues the FNSPF.
This morning, the Minister of the Interior spoke about this incident after coming out of a crisis meeting on this subject. He said in particular that a person with “cardiovascular disease” “would have died” in Morbihan, for lack of “being able to reach the emergency services in time”. “Two other cardiovascular accidents took place in Reunion, but I cannot say if the time (before the arrival of the emergency services, editor’s note) was particularly long and if it is attributable to this emergency number”, a added the minister. “What is certain is that people testified that they tried to call several times and that they did not succeed immediately in having operators,” he insisted.
The 112, on the model of the American “911”
The breakdown at the operator Orange, which seriously disrupted emergency numbers on Wednesday evening, comes a week after the adoption by the National Assembly on first reading of a bill which aims in particular to establish a single dedicated number emergency calls, 112, modeled on the American “911”. Three modalities will be tested: a merger of “all the services” (number 15, 17 and 18), a gathering without “police-rescue” (15 and 18), or a simple “regrouping” of the Samu and the doctors of guard in conjunction with other emergency services (15 and on-call).
This consensual text, which intends to consolidate the French civil security model largely based on volunteer firefighters (80% of the 250,000 firefighters), is now expected in the Senate. The failure of an equipment responsible for routing calls massively hampered access to emergency numbers (15/17/18/112) and to landlines Wednesday afternoon until midnight, providing many emergency services. help difficult to reach by the public across France.