atcomsystems.ca/forum Forums TDM Business Telephone Systems NEC Telephones & Systems Misterious 911 call

There is another 911 thread around here, which I replied to, but that made me remember another misterious 911 call we had from our system, which was a 2400ICS. A portion of one of our building was under renovation, and contsruction workers were in the middle of demolishing walls. There were still live phone lines around with analog extensions. All of a sudden, the police shows up to look into a 911 call. When I checked SMDR, there it was: a 911 call from a certain extension. When I went to locate the caller, it turns out that the call "was made" from a line that was chopped off, and the bare end of the copper cable was sitting in a puddle of water. Doing DCONX was showing the line being shorted and un-shorted constantly and randomly. It was like that at the time of the 911 call. No-one ever admitted to hooking up a butt-set to the bare wires and calling 911.
I almost remember having another incident like this: a line on a shorted wire with no phone attached to it ended up calling 911.
I might just be dreaming or missing something completely, but I post this here in case it is a real occurance and somebody else may have experineced something similar.

I have seen a fair amount of 911 calls like this - commonly on lines used primarily for fax.

What amy ahve happened in your case is that the shorted line "pulse dialed" 1 1 1 1 ... -- If Panic 911 is enabled (9+11 = 911) your system might have modified the digits and outpulsed 9 1 1.

On faxes, it tends to be because a user can't remember if he dialed the 1 already, and did it again, or hit 9,1-plus a speed dial that already has 1,AC,CO+Loop

I had A 66 block get wet and shorted then 911 center is called with now one a the line they call back and no answer cop are sent. This is in a nursing home.

I have seen this sort of thing happen down here in the days of rotary dial fones and systems that could use them. We use EMG codes 111 and 911. We used to have sites with faulty line jacks shorting together and dialing 1-111 (1 being the trunk access) those sites had their trunk access changed to 9 so the problem went away. It was usually areas with high sulfur content in the air but I find it hard to imagine a faulty line jack dialing 9 pulses first , the two single pulses I can understand..

Had one hotel where sea air was dissolving the cheap wiring. 66-blocks were exposed under stairwells, bad things like that. no possible way to find the faulty circuit that was doing the dialing.

To stop phantom calls to room 111, I changed the room number to 511, then sent 111 straight to voicemail. A transaction box asked if you were calling room 111, to please press 8. Otherwise it said "Bye" and hung up. Stopped the problem.

This was possibly one of the reasons Australia used 000 (that's 10 pulses each digit!!)

Nah. You guys just wanted to be different from the rest of the world.

America isn't the rest of the world! The UK uses 999 to name just one!

And we use 111 and 911 here in NZ. Haven't the gnomes of Brussels decreed that it will be changed to 112 in the UK??