It rained a lot this morning and parts of Louisville flooded. That's nobody's fault but that bitter cunt Mother Nature, but there was an incident that once again reflected poorly on the city's ability to handle anything beyond "75 and sunny".
Due to the flooding, heavy traffic, and overall shittiness of the morning, our store wasn't very busy this a.m., so my cigarette-smoking coworkers were toking up on the company dime even more than usual. One of them noticed a lot of smoke coming from the apartment complex behind our shopping center. It was pretty obvious that lightening had hit a building and started a pretty major fire.
Since we're nothing if not good citizens, we tried to call 911. There was no answer.
Let me repeat that: 911 did not answer our call. Or the one after that. Or the one after that. Or...you get the picture. I guess in hindsight we could have called a fire department directly, but isn't the point of 911 that you don't have to have the number of a police/fire department handy?
I realize the city was incredibly fucked up this morning, but no answer at all? No recording? No elevator music? No "Please press '1' if you can see a building burning to the ground"?
We do have a posted phone number to the Hurstbourne Acres police chief, so we called him and he used his magic Batman phone to alert the proper authorities. Five different fire departments arrived shortly thereafter, and the firemen did a fine job of keeping the blaze contained to the one building.
Given the unusal circumstances of the day, was I wrong to expect someone to answer the phone?
6 Comments:
That's ridiculous.
frightening. terrifying. isn't this 2009?
There was a HUGE storm in the college town I lived in one night while I was at work - flooding, tornadoes, all that fun stuff. On the news, they were broadcasting the 911 number to call if you saw any dangerous flooding in the roadways so that they could block traffic. Well, the intersection in front of the restarant I worked in had cars FLOATING in it. I called the police number on TV and the lady who eventually answered said something along the lines of "ugh! Why can't you just deal with this yourself? Go, like, stand in the road or something and make the cars stop coming. Whatever" and hung up. Protect and serve, yes?
see, now this is a real horror story. what if you call and there is no one to help???
Did you ever think that maybe the storm caused a loss of services?
If there is a loss of services, I would think there would just be no line, not a constant ringing of the phone.
If it IS true that a loss of phone service would result in the other line ringing, then that would answer the question "Was I wrong to expect someone to answer the phone?"
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