Trapped girls updated Facebook instead of calling police
Police in Australia have voiced their concern about the growing use of social networking sites after two young girls who were trapped in a drainage well system updated their Facebook profiles instead of calling the emergency services for help.
By Bonnie Malkin in Sydney
Published: 10:45AM BST 08 Sep 2009
The girls, aged 10 and 12, used their mobile phones to access the popular website and update their statuses, alerting friends and family that they were lost in a storm drain in Adelaide's southern suburbs. Their exact status updates have not been released.
The girls were rescued at about 7.30pm on Sunday night after a friend, who was online at the time, decided to call the police. Ambulance crews were sent to the scene but the girls were not injured and did not require treatment.
Glenn Benham, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Fire Service (MFS) in Adelaide, said it was lucky that someone had seen their status update and realised that it was not a joke. Storm drains are prone to flash flooding and are very dangerous, the fire service has warned.
"It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls," he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
"If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000 [the Australian equivalent of 999], 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."
Terry Flew, Professor of Media and Communications at the Queensland University of Technology, said Facebook and sites like it had become the first port of call for young people who wanted to get their message – no matter how serious – out into the public realm.
"For these kids, by the sounds of it, being on Facebook is just such a pervasive part of their lives that it seems the first line of response if they need to communicate a message to others.
"I guess for these people the natural way to send a message out to their friends and others is via Facebook, unfortunately in this case the message was that they were stuck in a stormwater drain."
