As the U.S. and Canada have designated 9-1-1 as their unique emergency number, other countries have their individual, historically grown structures of emergency numbers. A few years ago, an APCO International evaluation revealed that there are more than 170 different numbers worldwide to reach first responders. Not all of them are three-digit numbers, and not all of them are treated the same way. We thought it would be interesting to identify differences in countries, cultures and emergency numbers. And be sure, I won’t bother you with more than 170 different articles, but hopefully with a nice selection.

For the first article, I have chosen to report about my home country, Austria. And because it is one of the 27 member states of the European Union, you will also find an introduction to the European-wide “112” emergency number.

Demographics
Austria is a prosperous democratic country with a long history. It was established in 976 as the Margravate of Austria (yes, 1,034 years ago). It evolved to the Duchy of Austria in 1156, became the Austrian Empire in 1804, was proclaimed a republic in 1918, was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938, and occupied by the victorious Allies in 1945. It has been an independent nation since 1955 and a member of the European Union since 1995.

Figure 1

The country is in the middle of the European continent, north of Italy, south of Germany (see Figure 1). Approximately 8.2 million people live on an area of 83,870 sq km (slightly smaller than Maine). Austria is surrounded by eight neighboring countries, where six different languages are spoken. You can imagine the challenges in cooperation between public safety organizations.

The capital city is Vienna, with approximately 2 million residents. Austria is in the UTC+1 hour time zone, so it’s six hours ahead of Washington, D.C., during Eastern Standard Time.

Emergency Numbers
Believe it or not, eight different emergency numbers are used in Austria (see Table 1, below). These numbers have been introduced since implementation of three-digit emergency numbers in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the “youngest” emergency numbers being 147 (an advisory hotline for kids and juveniles when they get to the age when “parents become difficult”) and the European-wide 112, which was introduced in 1991.

Table 1: Austria’s Emergency Numbers

You might wonder, why 141 as a “non-emergency medical service” is an emergency number. The reason: In the Austrian telecommunications act, all the mentioned numbers are technically treated as emergency numbers, with priority in the networks and specific service level requirements for the telecommunications operators, but also operational obligations for PSAPs.

Annual Emergency Call Volume
In 2009, around 7.5 million emergency calls were answered by PSAPs in Austria. The majority—almost 3 million calls—were managed by police calltakers. Ambulance PSAPs received 1.3 million calls and fire brigades almost 0.5 million calls. The rest were shared among the other emergency numbers, but the medical service, 141, received the most, with 1 million calls.

In Vienna, the federal police answered 2,800 calls daily, resulting in around 1,200 police unit interventions per day. This also shows that only one-third of the emergency calls are real emergencies. The other calls include mostly information requests, hoaxes and false calls.

PSAP Structure
First responder organizations, except the federal police, are organized and financed in a decentralized manner. The nine province governments are responsible for medical services. The municipalities and the mayors maintain their local fire brigades, but the province governments have to support them financially.

Ambulance PSAPs are established either on a province level or, in larger provinces, on a regional basis. Many fire brigades operate call centers in their municipalities, but most have been reorganized into one PSAP at the provincial level.

More and more, the almost 2,000 municipal fire brigades and the ambulance services are migrating from their individual, local PSAPs to integrated provincial PSAPs, which are financed by the province governments and bringing together calltaking and dispatching.

The federal police are divided into nine provincial headquarters and then into 98 district HQs, each with a police PSAP that receives 133 (police) and 112 (European emergency number) calls originating in the respective district.

Police PSAPs can be quite small, from two officers in a rural district answering two phone lines and dispatching units over one radio channel, up to the size of the police headquarters in Vienna, where several positions—up to 15 calltakers for each of the 15 emergency phone lines, two officers for information requests, one officer for automatic bank alarm systems and four to eight radio dispatchers on several radio channels—have to be staffed.

The 112 call is received by a police PSAP, where calls to 133, the police emergency number, are also answered. If it’s a pure police job, a unit is dispatched.

Figure 2

Calls to the fire brigade number, 122, are received at their PSAPs. 144 calls for medical emergencies are answered at EMS PSAPs, where dispatching units also takes place (see Figure 2).

Police, fire brigades and ambulances and their respective PSAPs in a common geographic area are interconnected via direct phone lines to hand over 112 emergency calls in case a call requires action from another or several first responder organizations or in case of a wrong number.

Depending on the incident, each PSAP is also capable of initiating a conference call between the caller, the first receiving taker and another responsible PSAP to avoid errors in transmitting the information.

Near-Future Changes
Many emergency services are moving to integrated PSAPs due to financial impacts and to enhance professionalism. The federal police are planning to restructure the whole process of calltaking and dispatching. Instead of 98 calltaking and dispatch locations, the plans are to have only two (eventually nine) centers, where emergency calls will be answered, and nine dispatch centers on the level of provincial police structures.

With this structure, a higher professionalism can be reached and staff can be educated more specifically. An important issue for each country in Europe, with its 22 different national languages and the increasing ratio of traveling people, is to offer multilingual emergency services. With a centralized PSAP structure, better language skills can be organized.

And with more professional education, the job of a calltaker or dispatcher is raised in acceptance and awareness, and should offer better career options.

PSAPs will also be equipped with CAD systems in the near future.

European Number: 112
With increased mobility and improvement of the European Union—“traveling without borders” in the EU—it became necessary to introduce a unique emergency number for the whole European Union, otherwise a traveler in a case of emergency would need to know which country he/she is in and what the local number for the required emergency service is.

In 1991, the EU issued a European Directive, obliging each member state to introduce 112 as the European emergency number, to be reached over all communications networks, be it wired or mobile. The call has to be free of charge for the caller and be adequately answered by a responsible PSAP. The network operators are obliged to give the 112 calls priority in their networks to avoid problems in case of congestion and have to deliver the available data (e.g., name, address, position information of the caller) to the PSAP.

There are EU initiatives going on to improve the service to the public—E112, taking into account the need for better accuracy in location information and new media, like VoIP, photos, video capability of cell phones; eCall to improve safety in cars, comparable to the products OnStar and ATX offer in the U.S.; multilingualism, etc. All European member states have implemented 112 as required, but may also maintain their legacy emergency numbers. The EU directive only obliges a guarantee of exactly the same service level for national numbers and for 112. Most European non-EU member states, like Norway, Iceland, Serbia, Croatia and others, and some non-European countries have introduced 112 as an emergency number.

Some European countries decided to terminate all legacy numbers. This will be the topic of a coming article.

About the Author
Brigadier-General Manfred Blaha is technology advisor for national crisis and disaster prevention management for the Ministry of the Interior in Austria. He leads several projects for Austrian Federal Police Communications (112+ Dispatch Centers, Radio Network, Emergency Operations Centre, Civil Protection Communications). He has been an APCO International member since 1996, served as APCO’s international vice president from 2005-2007 and has been the International Chapter representative on the Executive Council since 2008.