Have you ever called 911 or any emergency contact number?

I have to report accidents, and also twice to report drunk drivers that passed me on the freeway. Don’t know how quickly the Highway Patrol responded.

We have at work to get an ambulance, and had the Fire Department show up in two minutes.

I’ve reported a car on fire on the side of the road. A scary crash on the interstate involving a truck and someone mowing the median. Sparks flying out of a streetlight adjacent to the FL turnpike. Basically, it all was while traveling. The first two I mentioned 911 had already been called by other people. I dont know how fast 911 responded, because in those cases I didn’t wait. When I had a crash one time, someone called 911, because suddenly emergency vehicles started showing up. They were there in minutes. Fire, “ambulance,” police, everything.

I’ve call non-emergency police lines a few times too.

My most recent call was for a truck that dropped a pile of wood in the middle of the road virtually closing it. The poor guy was pulling out of Lowe’s parking lot and at least 2 dozen long 2×4s slid off the back. It made quite a mess.
I used my cellphone and the 911 center latched on preventing me from hanging up until they were finished.

Yes. Less than a minute. The fire station/ambulance station is about ½ mile away.

nope

Lots of times. In Wichita it took more than an hour for help to arrive.
In the town I live in now they’re here anywhere from 60 seconds to 3 minutes.

Most recently I called because there was a car weaving all over the main road in town. We were right behind it, watching. Rick was driving. Suddenly he yelled, “Shit she’s on the sidewalk! Call 911!”
I did, trying to give a blow by blow, and giving directions, which I suck at, especially when I’m flustered like I was. She was all over the place.
She ended up taking a wide, sweeping left onto a residential street (the one I live on, actually.) In the course of her turn she wound up fully in the yard of a small building, set well off of Main. She almost hit the building.
I’m blathering and blathering to dispatch, “Oh shit! She almost hit that building!”
Now she’s on this residential street, wheels going up on the sidewalk, down, crossing the street and banging into the curb on the other side, back to her side.
Then we saw a truck parked on the side of the road, about 3 blocks down.
Rick said, “She’s gonna hit that truck!”
And sure as hell, she slammed into it so hard it knocked it clear out of the street and into a driveway. (Ha ha! I just noticed the neighbor sittin’ on his stoop in a camp chair, beer cooler beside him, watching!)
Rick stopped and got out to take her keys. Her door was open and she was trying to take off her seatbelt and restart the car at the same time.
Suddenly about 10 other cars showed up and surrounded us. They were all the people she’d impacted on her horrifying trip.
One guy had a big truck with one of those push guards on it. He said he had come really close to pushing her to the side of the road on Main. We have one too, and had considered it as well.
And Pizza Hut delivered a pizza in the middle of all this.

I got tons of stories, actually. Like the time my son got stuck in a mailbox and 911 had to get him out. But I shall spare you.

Not me, but the cat did while I was at work. Apparently, she jumped up on the desk, knocked the phone receiver off the hook, and walked across the keypad hitting the emergency button. The person who took the call could only hear paper rustling (at the cat walked across a stack), so sent a team out to check. One of the apt. complex reps. called me at work to let me know what had happened. It was a bit humiliating.

Other than that, just four calls to the local police dept. to report a domestic dispute at the house several doors down, two incidents involving a wounded deer in the road, and someone crawling into the window of the vacant house next door.

When my daughter was 3 she called 911. The first I knew of it was when the cops showed up on our door step. I was confused at first, then I realized my baby was inching around to take shelter behind me. She wailed, “I just wanted to talk to my daddy!” ;(

@jca…ya ever coming outta pergatory there?

Once, by accident. That’s how I learned that if you dial 911 by accident, you don’t just hang up and pretend it never happened.

Oh! Actually, I did call on purpose once a few years ago. There was an altercation outside my apartment building in which a guy was pulled into a truck and I think threatened with a knife. They were a construction crew working on a building close to mine, and I guess there was some money problem. While I was still on the phone, they all calmed down and went their separate ways. If I recall correctly, they didn’t even send officers over. #Mobtownproblems

Yes, once when my son (at age 15) fell off the pool slide, doing tricks. The ambulance seemed to take forever, but he wasn’t hurt, just breath knocked out.

Once when my mother-in-law had chest pains, about 15 minutes for ambulance. My (now grown)son says she does this about two or three times a year.

Once when my daughter-in-law had severe stomach pains, again about 15 minutes. She had kidney stones, extremely painful.

The oddest time was when the police showed up at the door asking about my adult grandson’s girlfriend (now wife). They live with us. It appears she was threatening suicide ONLINE and a friend from Europe contacted the local police. They took her to the hospital, and I picked up Grandson from work and drove him to the hospital. There was absolutely NOTHING wrong, except her idle rambling on the computer.

Called 911 not long ago, when my sons oldest boy accidentally locked his two year old sister and one year old brother in the car, and the keys were in the car.
The locksmiths were all out of town, so one of the cops had to run to his house to get a Jimmy stick he had. The one who was here was talking to the other on the phone. The time went by so damn slow. I was going, “He better be hurrying! He better be driving like hell!” Finally he just came flying around the corner and I was like, “Good boy!”
He was one of the cops I worked with at the jail.

Many times, the one I remember best is seeing a brush fire in the median. Calling 911 the person answering on the other end said, “Guard Post Fort _____ ”. The closest emergency response center was an Army reservation. I was able to give them a mile marker. She thanked me.
Another one watching someone driving about 80 MPH in a snow storm in the oncoming lanes. They bounced around on a bridge with concrete guardrails. Don’t know what the final outcome was that day. Called 911 before they came to a halt.

I’ve called a couple of times for cow out, when they’re near highways. (This is rural Kansas. Half the police records are for cow outs.) If we’re in the country Rick just chases them back in the fence with the truck.

About 12 years ago, I was in my jammies and roasting lamb chops in the oven. I had the lamb chops up too high, too close to the heating element, and they caught on fire. I called 911 and the dispatcher told me to get everyone out of the house. He’d asked who lives there, and I said just me and the cats. I threw the cats out onto the deck and then I went in and shut the oven off. The fire went out. I had some time, I tidied up. The state police came and the fire trucks came and I was very embarrassed but also relieved to tell them I burned my lamb chops. I actually was able to eat the lamb chops, they weren’t that burned. I was really scared of fire since I lived in a building once and we were all made homeless by some idiot who started a fire.

I’ve also called 911 when I’m driving and I see an accident or I see someone doing something stupid (like stopped in the middle of the road blocking traffic, for example).

LOLL!! I’m sorry for the scare, @jca but that is so something that would happen to me! Once I woke up to smell smoke. Rick was gone. I was worried. It was Christmas time. I called 911. They came out…and put out the smoldering ashes in my fireplace. I DIDN’T THINK THEY’‘D STILL BE SMOLDERING 12 HOURS LATER!

The last time I called 11 was about 2 years ago, home alone at the old ranch and a couple of drunk teens, a boyfriend and girlfriend, ran off the road at the sharp, almost hairpin, curve on the main road above our little side road. Our property was about 1/8th of a mile down from the main road.
I was sitting on the big porch around 9 pm, when I heard the squeal of tires, a crash and the car went through our neighbors pasture fence and came to a stop about 100 yards in.
The fire dept. was the 1st to arrive in about 10 minutes, being a rural area and then the county Sheriff.

People ran off the road there all the time, we heard squealing tires almost every day, it was so frequent we called them “squealers.” You could always tell by how fast they were going before they hit the curve. We would joke about ” Oh, here comes a squealer” and then just wait to see if we heard a crash.
It was so frequent our neighbors moved their cows and a couple horses to another field because they were afraid someone was going to kill one.

Screw the drivers, save the cows and horses. haha

911, not 11 not hitting the keys hard enough apparently. haha

I have.
I don’t know when the emergency services arrived, but I know there is a vast difference in the way services handled the call.
The worst want you to ‘Verify your social security number’ before they’ll file a report. (~)
The best, to my knowledge, just responded to the emergency.

Many times, but most recently was last week. One of my neighbors frantically banged on my door and asked if I could come up the street and check on another neighbor and possibly drive her to the hospital. By the time I got up there, about 10 houses away, the sick neighbor was in a bad way, so I opted to call 911 instead of driving her to the ER, where I knew we would have to wait in line and get checked in before they would even assess her. The paramedics were there on the scene in less than 3 minutes, then they started treating her with an IV on the scene and then loaded her into the ambulance and took her to the ER. My other neighbor and I followed in the ambulance. It’s a good thing we called 911, because there was probably 75 other people in the ER waiting room, either who had checked in already and were waiting for triage, or still waiting in line just to get checked in. I’ve been in that spot before and you can be there for 15 minutes, to an hour or more in that circumstance.

The other neighbor, who is also elderly can’t drive at night, that’s why she came and got me, plus she was a little bit panicky, because the sick lady is her friend. She trusted that I would know what to do.

Turns out that my elderly neighbor had a severe kidney infection with extreme dehydration. If the other neighbor hadn’t gone to check on her, she probably would have died.

I just visited the neighbor who had been in the hospital and she was all thank you’s and smiles today. She still has a catheter, and will for about another 3 weeks, but she looked really good and was very happy that I came up there and called 911.

Edit: we followed the ambulance, we didn’t travel in the ambulance.

Only once. It rang about 10 times the was answered by a machine that put me on hold. I could not believe it!!!! I called the non-emergency police number and got help that way. I found 911 useless.

^^ wow.

yes
I accidentally cut off two fingers on left hand.
had to call 911 for help.
a fire truck and an ambulance showed up
the ambulance took me to a hospital.
Later I received a bill for $875.00
plus the hospital bill of $140,000.
no fun…LOL
i had no insurance other than VA
and had to declare bankruptcy.

@babaji Man, stories like that make me feel grateful that I’m a Canadian. I don’t know how Americans live under the constant fear of something like that.

My daughter is currently without insurance. The state cut her off without warning, and open enrollment at her work isn’t until January. She has several meds she takes. She hasn’t had any for a couple of months now.

I have had my calls routed to machine, as well, @MollyMcGuire.

So, my daughter just got a surprise notice that her kids have been taken off of state insurance as well. She’s going nuts trying to figure out how she can support insurance premiums on her salary, in addition to everything else.

Quick, somone call 911 I am OD’ing on Cinnamon Rolls. lol

Wait. What did my response, above @Coloma,‘s have to do with this question??!!

@Dutchess_III No connection, just being a silly goose, you know I excel at that. haha