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SALT LAKE CITY -- Salt Lake City police are searching for whoever has been using a cell phone to swamp the 911 emergency line by sending as a many as 600 prank calls in one day. It happened Nov. 2, and police say if it is a prank, it's not funny and could cost someone their life.
Dispatchers at the Salt Lake City Police department say last Tuesday was out of control.
"Our supervisor counted them up, and we had about 617 on a disconnected cell phone," said dispatcher Joann Ryan. "We tried to keep an open line to see if they would say something; or people would try to talk and say, ‘If you need something, just call us or else please stop calling.'"
At first, dispatchers were concerned someone really needed help. Using triangulation off cell phone towers, the calls were traced to a location in an industrial area of Salt Lake City near 1500 West and 1800 South.
Every time an officer went to look, though, nothing was found. The calls didn't stop either.
"As soon as you finished with one call, then you would get this person again -- and you knew it was this disconnected phone, and so what could you do?" Ryan said.
All those calls also tied up phone lines and resources for real emergencies, where seconds count.
"There are cases every day that come into us, and it's very important that they called 911 when they did," said Niki Yeaton, a nurse coordinator at University Hospital. "Time matters, seconds matter. For us, one of the biggest statements we make is ‘time is tissue.' That can relate to brain tissue, cardiac tissue if you're a trauma patient."
Police never found who made the calls, which stopped about seven hours after starting.
Dispatchers think it was either a prank or a child playing with an old cell phone, whose parents maybe didn't know even disconnected cell phones can still make 911 calls.
"It's just that much longer that somebody with a real emergency has to wait," Ryan said. Dispatchers say it's a good idea to either get rid of your old cell phones by donating them or recycling them, or at least take out the battery.
E-mail: acabrero@ksl.com
