Trapped girls raised alarm on Facebook (instead of calling 911/000)

[GRiM]

I just found this to be weird, I cant really say that I learned anything from it, but I found it strange enough to put it here. Would be intresting to hear if anyone else have any thoughts about this.

Trapped girls raised alarm on Facebook

The South Australian Metropolitan Fire Service (MFS) says it is worrying that two girls lost last night in a stormwater drain raised the alert on a social networking site rather than ringing 000.

The 10 and 12-year-old girls updated a Facebook status to say they were lost in a drain on Honeypot Road at Hackham in Adelaide's south.

Glenn Benham from the MFS says it was fortunate a young male friend was online at the time and was able to call for help on their behalf.

"It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls," he said.

"If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000, so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway."

((photocaption))
Two girls lost in a stormwater drain raised the alert on a social networking site rather than ringing triple-0. (Getty Images: Chris Jackson, file photo)

 

[Mountain Crown]

This doesn't make sense. Could it be the girls found some kind of celebrity-like pleasure in this?

 

[Nawd]

Could it be that they are not being taught, as they used to be, to use 000, and it didn't even occur to these girls that they were in the trouble they were in? Maybe 000 was busy, and that was their last resort. Pretty strange.

I'd be curious to read their point of view.

 

[GRiM]

This doesn't make sense. Could it be the girls found some kind of celebrity-like pleasure in this?

I thought along the same line. Make something spectacular for their facebook-audience. But its still strange. Like Dawn said, I'll see if I can find a update, not to much hope that there will be a follow up.

I'll guess I'd mentally file this under facebook/celebrity-culture madness :)