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."
Shame on you Facebook! (Score:5, Funny)
The girls were eligible for a Darwin Award and you took it away from them!
Re:Shame on you Facebook! (Score:4, Funny)
New clause to be added to Facebook TOS:
If you find yourself in an emergency situation, please add "911 Emergency Response" as a friend, then write a simple wall posting describing the nature of your emergency. Help will be dispatched immediately.
Re:Shame on you Facebook! (Score:5, Funny)
Do you want to be a fan of "911 Emergency Response"?
[Yes] [No]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Do you want to be a fan of "911 Emergency Respo... (Score:3, Funny)
A notification has been sent to "911 Emergency Response". The user must accept your friend request before they will appear in your friends list.
[meanwhile, the victim dies because "911 Emergency Response" is actually "sleeping in today and not going to class cuz last night was so crazy omfg".]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Shame on you Facebook! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
If I've learned anything from Idiocracy it's that technology ultimately gets in Darwin's way.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Darwin Award would be mandatory if they had posted on 4chan.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Well you have to die or compromise your ability to procreate to "win". It's not an award for stupid people, else we'd give you one too.
Coverage in the stormdrain? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:2)
That's in the sanitary sewers.
Teenagers? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
Re: (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: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:Teenagers? (Score:4, Funny)
Want a balloon Georgie? They all float down here!
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.
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Teenagers? Teenagers! (Score:3, Funny)
"Two teenage girls (aged 10 and 12)..."
Teenagers just keep getting younger and younger these days.
They're naught-teen and twain-teen, respectively. Where is the mystery here, gentlemen?
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Insightful)
Insightful? (Score:5, Funny)
Well, you have to be 13 to have a Facebook account. They have Facebook accounts. So they must be 13, and hence teenagers, even if they're only 10 and 12. Seems perfectly clear to me.
I like to be modded up as much as the next person, but Insightful? Jeez, I was trying for Funny.
Re:Teenagers? (Score:4, Funny)
Girls mature faster than boys. :-)
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Teenagers? (Score:5, Funny)
Overheard in a subway car...
Friend A: "My god, I can't believe I'm turning 20 tomorrow."
Friend B: "Yeah, man, double digits, wow."
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Mayan calendar
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Oh, tell me about it. I remember the days of Beverly Hills 90210 when some teenagers were 30!
Stupid girls. (Score:4, Funny)
Cry for help on Twitter (Score:5, Funny)
Everyone knows that if you need to call for rescue, you use twitter.
"HELP ME! I am stuck and in real trouble and hurt real bad! I think my leg is broken, and I am losing a lot of blood. You can find me at"
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Maybe she was dictating it?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Instead Of Getting Help (Score:4, Funny)
They might have gotten 112,076 "fans of teenage girls trapped in wells."
Re: (Score:2)
Two girls one sewer? Nah, bit redundant.
Actually... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Actually... (Score:5, Funny)
That's nothing. I fell into an experimental cryogenics pod and was frozen for 1000 years, and had to wait for time travel to be developed, so that I could travel back in time and tell Matt Groening my life story, so he could make it into a popular cartoon series thus preventing a spacial anomaly that would have destroyed the alpha quadrant.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That's nothing. Just like this post. (Score:3, Informative)
---
Re:I can believe it (Score:4, Informative)
SMS uses messages on management connections that have stronger, more redundant error correction than the voice bearers. This is why in marginal signal situations, you can text but not talk.
Not too far-fetched (Score:4, Insightful)
So it's not unthinkable to imagine that they had crap for voice reception but had no issues with a web connection, especially given that they were inside a storm drain.
Oh, and when did a ten-year-old and twelve-year-old become teenagers? (The answer: "not yet".)
Darwin (Score:3, Funny)
Darwin at work, foiled by luck.
conservative (Score:5, Insightful)
I will admit, silly as it may sound, contacting rescuers via messaging in a non-critical emergency situation may not be a bad idea. It's more friendly battery-wise, where you may not get a chance to recharge a cell phone (in the sewers, for instance); and it can be less ambiguous than speech and more easily reviewed (although all the OMGs and missing vowels might prove problematic.
Re: (Score:2)
I will admit, silly as it may sound, contacting rescuers via messaging in a non-critical emergency situation may not be a bad idea.
This assumes that the situation will remain stable. That is a big assumption to make - even for an adult. If you are a kid, you dial 911.
911 Useless from cell (Score:2)
This has been promoted somewhat - First, in Northern California, if you call 911 from a cell phone you will get forwarded to a central highway patrol dispatch center and immediately placed on hold from 5 to 10 minutes. I've called 911 twice from my cell and both times I was home before I got off hold. This will probably get fixed when the GPS locating mess gets fixed. Meanwhile, you program in as many non-911 local agency numbers as you can.
Second, as parent pointed out you may be able to text when voice wo
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.
Silly Silly Questions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sigh. The stupid stuff people keep asking over and over.
To me, teenager always meant 10 and up. I don't know. Maybe the definition is different in Australia. (I'm from Adelaide, too, btw, where this took place. Adelaide is a city of just over 1 million people.)
What were they doing in a storm drain? I don't know, exploring maybe? We've had stories about underground urban exploration on slashdot before, and there's many sites out there on it, such as caveclan. (http://www.caveclan.org/). Their site appears to be down atm but it was about the exploration of tunnels in Melbourne and around Australia.
And yeah, as others pointed out; perhaps their signal wasn't strong enough to call but they could text or get data.
Re: (Score:2)
To me, teenager always meant 10 and up. I don't know. Maybe the definition is different in Australia. (I'm from Adelaide, too, btw, where this took place. Adelaide is a city of just over 1 million people.)
Maybe, because in the U.S. "teenager" refers to 13-19 year olds. 10-12 year olds are sometimes called "tweens" (a bastardization of "between" - out of single digits, but not a teen yet), but never "teenagers".
Re:Silly Silly Questions... (Score:5, Insightful)
"Or, as we say around here, zeroteen!"
To me, teenager always meant 13 to 19, because, y'know, those are the numbers that actually have *teen* in them.
Re: (Score:2)
So if a child has never been to school, you would also consider them a pre-schooler? Sigh.
Re: (Score:2)
So if a child has never been to school, you would also consider them a pre-schooler? Sigh.
Technically ;)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You're an odd duck, considering the term refers to the word 'teen' in the English word for the age in question. You'll notice that neither "ten" or "twelve" contain the ending that "thirteen" and "eighteen" do.
It seems fairly obvious to most people that "teen" means 13-19 (even though there's overlap in there with "adult" in some cultures). 'Tween' was invented by some moron to describe the pre-teen adolescent ages of approximately 10-12.
Wolfenstein (Score:2)
What were they doing in a storm drain?
Clearly they were playing Wolfenstein RPG and decided the sewer system was the only way to reach the castle in time.
Re: (Score:2)
When I was around their age, my friends and I would explore everything, including storm drains. We never went in far enough to get lost, though. Which was good, because it was way before cell phones. Our best chance for getting help might have been to climb up and wave our hands out of the sewer grate, and that might just have caused a zombie panic...except we didn't have those when I was a kid, either.
Re: (Score:2)
No, it's not. I'm Australian too. Teen is thirTEEN to nineTEEN in every English-speaking country. And if you RTFA, that just says "two girls". It was the twat who submitted it who added "teenagers", as well as the idiotic "000 (Australia's 911)" explanation.
Re: (Score:2)
10-12 are "tweens", or more universally a preteen... not yet a teen but in the double digits.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preadolescence#Preteen_and_tween [wikipedia.org] if you believe that Wikipedia is the authority on everything, like I do!
ballsack conundrum (Score:5, Funny)
Facebook?!?! Why Facebook? (Score:2)
Everyone knows you should use Twitter for that... Duh.... :)
You gotta love the IT Crowd (Score:4, Funny)
Moss: Subject: Fire. Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road... no, that's too formal.
[deletes text, starts again] Fire - exclamation mark - fire - exclamation mark - help me - exclamation mark. 123 Cavendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, Maurice Moss.
[sigh of relief]
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
p0wn'd by f1re plz help 0x7B cavndn rd kthxbye
Informational content bellow: (Score:2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1EBfxjSFAxQ [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
[singing number]
Newsreader: 0118 999 881 999 119 725... 3
No cell signal (Score:3, Interesting)
You'd be surprised how useful Facebook is. (Score:3, Informative)
Guess where one of those phone numbers was? Facebook. I found myself a public terminal in the hotel lobby and got all the information I needed to be reuinted with my car, phone, and the road.
It is actually quite useful.
Stupidity isn't limited to the Facebook Generation (Score:5, Funny)
My stepmother was alone in the house and fell, breaking her tailbone. She managed to painfully drag herself across the room to the phone, which she used not to call 911, but to call a friend of hers from church. When she got that person's machine, she left a message asking her friend to pray for her. She then lay on the floor moaning until my brother happened to stop by the house and discover her several hours later. I never found out whether or not her friend got the message and prayed for her.
--Posted anonymously because the stupid burns.
Australia's 911 number (Score:5, Funny)
WTF? 000 is Australia's EMERGENCY number. Would you also say "they drive on the left side of the road (Australia's right)"? In China thay use chopsticks (Chinese knives and forks)?".
There is a point at which explaining by Yankie analogies just makes it more confusing. Try to realise that everyone in the world does not speak English, play baseball, use Fahrenheit.... I'm sure most of the readers here actually can cope with that, and you won't bamboozle the ones who AREN'T American either.
Re: (Score:2)
And anyway, 000 is really Australia's 999 number!
Unlike Space... (Score:3, Funny)
...apparently everyone on the Internet can hear you when you scream.
Oh, and everyone will eventually find those naked pics too.
Remember the bits (Score:2)
There may have been one very good reason for using Facebook: bandwidth.
The girls may not have been able to get a enough bandwidth to make a voice call, but easily enough for an SMS or other message type. Voice has to be real-time and uses several kilobytes of data transfer per second. Data can take all day to send a 1k message to Facebook, Twitter, ect...
Re: (Score:2)
Chasing storms while being thirsty, obviously.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Actually, with a storm drain like that, getting trapped isn't a likely scenario in a flash flood. I'd think getting flushed out into the maelstrom would be more likely. :)
Re:Overshadowing the fact (Score:4, Funny)
What were they doing in a storm water drain....?
Searching for the Ninja Turtles, probably.
Re: (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 play
Re: (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".
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
The lack of common sense is astounding.
Probably not as stupid as people assume. No where in the article was it mentioned that it was an emergency situation. They were lost in a place that they shouldn't have been, and probably just wanted some advice without drawing a lot of attention to themselves. Obviously using Facebook wasn't the wise move if they wanted to be discrete.
Re: (Score:2)
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Probably their friends knew the storm drains too, so they were hoping one of them would come down and guide them out. There's a bit of embarrassment where your friends know you're lost in a storm drain. There's a lot of embarrassment when it ends up on the local TV news.
They probably didn't consider the financial side of it too. Depending on the area, emergency services will respond, but they will also bill for the resources used. In most areas that I
Me too (Score:3, Informative)
Any (every ?) government gets a lot of flak for pretty much anything it does - you can't please all the people all the time and all that, but at the end of the day, they're n
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Recission should simply be made criminal except when actual fraud was perpetrated upon the insurance company. But it's rare, and so it's not really the problem.
Perhaps I can give you a bit more insight into how the system works from a slightly more insider perspective: insurance in the US is a complete dog's breakfast because there are 50 different state regulatory agencies telling companies what to do. My state places very few requirements on what the companies must cover, and premiums are fairl
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It makes sense from an entirely selfish point of view also.
Some amazingly large percentage of all bankruptcies in the US are caused by inability to pay for medical bills. That cost gets passed on to the population. It seems reasonable that this happens in a less efficient method than if medical costs were paid for up front by the population.
Also, I don't want to get mugged by some guy who lost his house to pay for his sister's life saving kidney replacement.
A functioning society that look after its members
Re:Age requirement for Facebook (Score:4, Informative)
No, you just have to say you are.
000, 999 and 111 make perfect sense (Score:3, Insightful)
In the dark or in smoke it was a lot easier to keep your finger in a single digit on a rotary dial (once you'd found the right one obviously). The same probably applies to a lesser extent for touch tone phones. Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
In many places another number (generally 311 or 711) is used as a non-emergency information service.
The history of 911 (Score:3, Informative)
Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.
In the states, dialing the operator, dialing "0," in an emergency was drilled into kids for the better part of one hundred years.
"911" was easily recognized by AT&T's switching logic as needing special handling. The History of 911 [911dispatch.com]
The "9" may have been suggested by the British "999" system adopted in 1937.
Re: (Score:2)
What is scary is that my blackberry becomes pretty much useless without a battery pull after calling an 911. I'm guessing this is to let the user know when they have accidentally called 911, but its extremely annoying when you do call in a emergency and have your phone bricked afterwards.
Re: (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 h
Re: (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 th
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
ten and twelve do not end in "teen"
To the contrary, the tens through twelves do end in the teens.
Re: (Score:2)
Your recursive remark recurses me.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)