Emergency services in Portugal

Today (Monday), I'm going to write this post during my flight from Lisbon to Amsterdam like I did to my blog on MSN. The idea is, like I wrote on the other blog, to give better use to time when I'm travelling. Let's see if I also get inspiration for writing this time. Before, I just want to add that I'm flying again with KLM on a Boeing 737-800 and the flight has been pretty similar to the last one a couple of days ago: comfortable, with “xpto” food, a nice crew and quick boarding time (no use of bus to get from the terminal to the aircraft).

So today’s' subject, like the title suggests, is about the way emergency services are working in Portugal nowadays. A week ago, on the news of every television and newspaper's website of the country there was shown a recording first between the family and the emergency services and afterwards only between emergency services (112 operator, doctor and firefighters). Here it is a copy of the recording on "Sapo Videos"...

Unfortunately the movie is in Portuguese, but I'll explain what it shows and why I'm writing about it. I have to start saying that this movie could have been taken from a comedy show, but the sad part is that the movie is very real. The first part shows the content of the call to the 112. It's stupid the amount of questions the operator asks to the victim's family and moreover the number of times the operator ask the same questions (on different times of the call) and the time spent just to do a simple call to 112. But this is not the worst...

The second part, the first time I saw it I started laughing, but then I realized that I was listening to a actual conversation and then I was amazed... I know that Portugal has several serious problems, but such incompetency, plus the fact of human lives being at stake, was too unbelievable for me. Why!? The 112 called to a fire department and there was only a firefighter on duty that was also using is cell phone while receiving the emergency call so that you can clearly see that he's not paying attention to the call. Moreover, he asks what he has to do. Come on, didn't he received training for doing his work on an emergency situation!? Oh, and when the operator is giving him the number of the emergency registration, he answers that he doesn't have anything to write. How can just a jackass like that be working as a firefighter?

After a certain point, the operator decides to call another fire department to quickly try dispatching an ambulance. The fire department, she called was on the next town, but again it had only a firefighter as well. With such incompetency shown so far, more one stopped surprising me.

At some point they found a way to solve the situation by making the second firefighter call others to enter on duty and head with the ambulance to the place where the emergency call was made.

Some days after this news, the firefighters' services were changed so that they would be able to give assistance on new similar situations. But that doesn't change the fact that there are serious problems with the emergency services in country such as Portugal, a country in Europe and member of the EU. Part of me still can´t believe that the video is real.

This is just something that I wanted to share with you that I think is cause of concern, specially for the people living in Portugal away from cities, because the call is made for fire departments of small villages or at least, really small towns (you can see where the place is at http://www.castedo.eu/googlemaps.htm ). Bye...