Trapped Girls Call For Help On Facebook 380
definate writes "Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12) found themselves trapped/lost in a stormwater drain in Adelaide, South Australia. The interesting point of this article that makes it Slashdot worthy, is that although the teenage girls had mobile phones, instead of calling for help using 000 (Australia's 911 number), they decided to notify people through Facebook. My guess is it was something along the lines of 'Jane Doe is like totally trapped in a stormwater drain, really need help, OMG!'. Luckily a young friend of the girls was online at the time and was able to call the proper authorities."
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
Call for help? (Score:3, Interesting)
So, what did they post exactly? I really doubt they actually called for help and I doubt even more they wouldn't have called 000 by themselves eventually. It's not like they were dying or something, they were just lost.
Re:Teenagers? (Score:2, Interesting)
But the real mystery is how they could have gotten lost in a storm drain. Did their parents "accidentally" flush them down the toilet? From the Wikipedia "Most storm sewers are provided with gratings or grids to prevent large objects from falling into the sewer system." It's a mystery that the article conveniently omits.
Re:Overshadowing the fact (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was a kid on my street there were two storm drains across the street from each other. We turned those things into pill boxes and shot waterguns at passing cars. There was also a pipe between them and we would go from one drain to the other, tons of fun.
Re:Overshadowing the fact (Score:3, Interesting)
Being kids.
Caves are cool. My friends and I used to go sledding in them in the winter. There was a runoff drain that ran under an entire golf course, probably about 300 yards long or so, and in the winter the bottom of it would ice up, so you could run your sled through it, in complete darkness and at great speed, with random 2 foot dropoffs as the pipes joined. Watch your head.
Every now and again, someone'd get hurt and end up in the hospital.
Kids do stupid stuff. It's part of being a kid.
I always played it safe - I wore my bike helmet. We also had someone go through first thing every day with a flashlight to make sure there were no obstacles, and he'd climb back up and give a report. Though generally by the time het got back half the kids were tired of waiting and went anyway. (grin)
Re:Overshadowing the fact (Score:3, Interesting)
I should have clarified that to say "caves are cool, and a storm drain is a big cave that's unlikely to collapse".
No cell signal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:slightly off topic (Score:3, Interesting)
one of the nice things about 911 is the 9 and the 1s are on different sides of the keypad, so if you call 911, you really mean to call it
Where there's a will, there's a way! :-)
In my office, we've had the police come by several times to the point where building management had to send an e-mail blast saying that we were going to get fined for accidentally dialing 9-1-1 and then hanging up. To dial out of our phone system, we have to hit 9. A lot of us have to get on conference calls which requires a 1-888 or 1-866 number. Well, some of my office mates would hit 9 to connect out, but for whatever reason they don't hear the dial tone, so they hit 9 again. (even though it registered the first time...)
Then for whatever reason, they would hit 1 twice (probably for the same reason why they hit 9 twice), connecting them to emergency dispatcher. They would immediately hang up, but by then it's too late. The dispatcher will automatically assume an emergency if you hang up, and a patrol car is sent to our office. We were told that if we accidentally do this again, to just stay on the line and to tell the dispatcher that it was an accident so that they don't automatically send police over.
I don't think we've had the problem since the warning, but I think it's interesting that despite the keys being all the way across the keypad, people still manage to dial 9-1-1.
Re:slightly off topic (Score:3, Interesting)
Going back to rotary phones which went clockwise 0987654321 (except in NZ) 111 would be really fast to dial but it can happen accidentally too easily with a loose wire or something because it's just three pulses. I'm guessing but that sort of accidental dialing is why the British choose 999. It's very unlikely that a loose wire would generate 9 pulses at the right pulse rate even once let along three times. But ... it's slower so maybe the US took a compromise and went for 911. I suspect in practice that the time you gain with less dial movement would be lost moving your finger.
The Kiwi dials went clockwise 0123456789 so I guess we followed the Brits and choose 111 which is the same pulses as 999 elsewhere.
Australian 000 is an odd choice. I vaguely remember some problems long ago with toll blocking on phones also unintentionally blocking 000. That probably only happened with equipment not approved for Australia.
Re:Actually... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Boy, that brings back memories.
When I was a kid, living in San Jose, CA., a friend and I discovered a storm drain that dumped into one of the numerous creeks in the area. It was rather large, large enough for a 12 yr old to walk upright in. It also had no grating on it at all. You could quite simply walk right into it. Being the adventurous kids we were, we did so, only to find that it went so far that we had to go back home and get flashlights in order to go any further. After about 3 hours of wandering around, we found a ladder that led to a small platform (no grues) and a door. An unlocked door. It led to a service room in the Eastridge Shopping Mall, bypassing all security measures the mall had in place. We wandered the mall (it was late at night) for a short time until we realized that there was a patrolling security guard on the premises.
This was the start of a long and interesting hobby of exploring any dark, and supposedly off-limits, entrances to the underworld. (Feel free to twist that statement to whatever your sick mind wishes...)
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Interesting)
I suppose you could say we did the same thing. A club, that is. We just didn't advertise it, primarily because we didn't want all the access routes we discovered bricked over.
To date, my favorite is the turn-of-the-century storm drain system carved out of the sandstone underneath Santa Cruz, CA. Some of them tunnels actually led into the basements of houses (I suspect they were once used in the 20's for rum-running), some right up against the floorboards of houses (once heard a conversation right through them), and some into long-forgotten rooms that still had old bottles and such in them. One of these rooms had a desk and chair in it, even though the tunnel was too small for the desk to fit through. Crazy. Must have been assembled in situ.
These tunnels were all hand-carved (the pick-marks still visible), and more then one led to a dead end--the tunnel was filled with beach sand, obviously meaning they led to the ocean, yet we never found an entrance/exit tunnel near the beach. We found 4 different entrances, yet not a single mention of these tunnels were to be found in any historical documents I researched, nor could I find a soul that knew about them besides us. As a matter of fact, most people didn't even believe us.
As evidence, I usually gave up the location of ONE of these tunnels (Under the small bridge just below Ocean View park, there is a pipe hanging from the bridge. Crawl out along it, over the river, and you will see the entrance on the far side of the pipe). It is a really short tunnel and just a very small taste of what is actually under Santa Cruz. The rest go with me to the grave as they are most definitely NOT safe.
A word of caution. NEVER enter tunnels like this during high-tide, before or during a rain storm or if you have any common-sense(we seriously lacked in this dept. back then). They are ALL UN-reinforced, sandstone is quite unstable and we discovered several cave-ins.
Entering ANY storm-drain system before,during or even long after rain is just plain suicidal. Don't fucking do it.
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Interesting)
"As a matter of fact, most people didn't even believe us."
This. The two historians I DID talk to about it refused to believe me even after I gave them the exact directions I gave in my post. One straight up called me a liar. Go figure.
I also told them about a cabin in the woods made entirely of huge slabs of Redwood bark, complete with a river rock altar and built into the entrance of a burned out, but still alive, Redwood tree. You can tell it is from the same era as the tunnels since the living Redwood tree that it is built against has grown around it. Didn't believe me.
I also told them about an underground, two-room apartment built into a hillside in the Santa Cruz mountains that appeared to be built in the exact same fashion as these tunnels (pick marks and swing patterns matched exactly), one that stood less then 200 yards from the Redwood Bark Cabin.
Didn't believe me.
I suspect that the person that built the 2-room apartment not only worked on the tunnel system, but also worked on the two railroad tunnels(less then a mile away) that were built around the same time as the tunnels. All have the same pick marks in them. Since the apartment is between the railroad tunnels and the city of Santa Cruz, I believe one of the workers simply built himself a temporary home.
Sometimes people simply refuse to understand, or believe, what is obviously real and true (kind of like the moron in another thread I responded to), for whatever reasons.
I've long since learned there is no point in trying to convince them otherwise (although I sometimes forget...like the moron in another thread I responded to). At some point, you just give up.