The government’s emergency hotline is now working.
After what it described as a ‘brief hiatus’, the Department of the Interior and Local Government (DILG) announced on Wednesday that the Emergency Hotline 911 has resumed its operation.
DILG Secretary Eduardo Año said the resumption of operation was initiated after they were able to address the issues pertaining to the manpower of the office that runs the Philippine Emergency Hotline 911.
Late August this year, the DLG announced that it would suspend the operation of the Emergency 911 after all the personnel manning the Emergency Telecommunicators (ETC) tested positive for the coronavirus.
The DILG then announced that Emergency 911 calls from the National Call Center were temporarily rerouted to eight local call centers when five emergency telecommunicators (ETCs) tested positive for COVID-19.
Año said that the problem was further aggravated when 20 more detailed personnel from the Bureau of Fire Protection also tested positive for the COVID-19 virus causing further delay in the resumption of the regular operations.
“We would like to inform the public that our Emergency 911 is now working normally,” said Año.
The E911 hotline is a DILG-run security and development program that provides response and emergency assistance to people in distress.
Calls coursed through this number include those that require police assistance, fire reports, emergency medical assistance, search and rescue, and even those that concern chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and explosive (CBRNE) materials.
For the entire 2019, the number of callers ballooned to more than 18 million compared to only 1.5 million in 2018. The ETC has only around 80 personnel.