The 112 telephone service in Valencia was interrupted on the afternoon of October 29 due to an outage linked to a system update which had been causing problems for several days. Employees had reported it several times, according to what four employees and a department manager told elDiario.es.
On October 30, the president of the Generalitat Valenciana, Carlos Mazón, described the information circulating regarding a fall of 112 on the day of the storm as a “hoax.” On November 11, Vice President Susana Camarero limited herself to attributing the failure to a high volume of calls. They both lied.
On the fateful afternoon of the flood, as water engulfed several Valencian municipalities, hundreds of people tried to contact 112 to report incidents. However, workers in this service often found themselves unable to speak with the citizens who called them.
“The calls came in and we listened to each other, but he didn’t listen to us,” one worker recalls of the situation on that fateful afternoon, when more than two thousand calls came in in one hour. “You had to hang up and call the person back, but most of the time we couldn’t talk to them because they tried to get back to us and got in line again.”
Other workers interviewed described a similar but reversed situation: “It also happened that we did not hear the person who was calling,” says Anastasio Borreguero, one of the service coordinators present on October 29. The other people interviewed requested anonymity to comment on the situation.
The employees consulted indicate that they had been warning about this failure for days. “There comes a point when we get tired of reporting that this happens,” describes one of the interviewees. “When an update of this type is carried out, in the following days we communicate the failures so that the Department of Communication Systems can correct them,” explains Borreguero, who specifies that this is something “common” when there are this type of updates.
Respondents agree that after the update and given the reported failures, the high call volume was the final straw and caused the system to completely collapse. . According to the minutes of the meeting of the Emergency Coordination Center, Cecopi, published by elDiario.es, between October 29 and November 1 – in four days of DANA – 112 people received 75,000 calls.
Ilunion, the company that manages 112, did not wish to make any comments to elDiario.es. This newspaper also requested its version from the Emergency Department and, although it dealt with the matter, at the end of this edition it was unable to collect the requested information, including incident reports.
“We could hear an echo”
All 112 workers quickly recognized when this issue arose on the call. “If you heard an echo when you picked up, it meant the caller couldn’t hear what you were saying,” says another worker. To the long waiting time, which lasted more than nine minutes after 8:30 p.m., the Valencians had to add that once they managed to pick up the call, they did not hear anyone on the other end of the line .
The sources interviewed describe a chaotic afternoon within the emergency service managed by subcontractor Ilunion. Both due to the accumulation of requests, with long waiting times, and due to the failure of the call reception system. “I’ve been working on this since 2001 and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Borreguero says.
Department officials designed what is called an “extraordinary operation,” which typically occurs in situations where a large volume of calls is expected. This operation represents a small change in the usual protocol to try to filter and prioritize the most urgent notices.
112 also requested assistance from staff in other departments or who were not scheduled to work that day and overtime was also assigned to other employees. Of the department’s usual 18 to 20 employees, there were about 35 to 40 employees, according to the sources interviewed.
The overflow was such that some coordinators even started answering calls. 112 workers explain that this is not exceptional and occurs during peak hours of work, but that it generally harms staff coordination.
“The Generalitat penalizes the company in the event of a missed call,” explains an employee. “On a busy day, the coordinators usually answer the phones so that doesn’t happen, but it keeps them from doing their job, which is to coordinate staff based on the calls we get.”
Borreguero, who works as coordinator, clarifies this aspect. “There came a time when it seemed like we were all doing everything,” he recalls. “It is true that some of us coordinators began to answer calls, but that does not mean that there was no one to coordinate, some remained to do this task. »
