Nobody's Coming

 ATTENTION. ATTENTION. THIS IS NOT A TEST. 

THIS IS YOUR EMERGENCY ALERT SYSTEM announcing THE COMMENCEMENT OF THE ANNUAL PURGE. COMMENCING AFTER THE SIREN, ALL CRIME WILL BE LEGAL FOR TWELVE HOURS.

9-1-1 IS HEREBY SUSPENDED. POLICE, FIRE, AND EMERGENCY MEDICAL SERVICES WILL BE UNAVAILABLE UNTIL 7 AM, WHEN THE PURGE CONCLUDES.

GOD BLESS AMERICA, A NATION REBORN. MAY GOD BE WITH YOU ALL.

This isn't the exact script from the Purge movies, but the gist is the same: starting after the siren, everything is legal, and nobody is coming to help. 

I can (and do) make jokes about it every time a new Purge movie or show comes out. "Throw a party-- when else are we all going to have time off together?"

And yet, there is something about that line that sends a chill down my spine. I have a pretty strong stomach for horror, so it seems like a pretty tame choice for "movie line that scares me most." And yet, far scarier than chainsaw killers or a 12-hour anarchy would be that moment of realization of: Nobody is coming to help.

I grew up in a world of relative security, promised by every trusted adult ever that help was never more than three button-pushes away. The safety net of 9-1-1 was always a given; we could summon these almost larger-than-life figures, professionals to whom we could transfer all of the responsibility of handling a disaster as soon as they rolled up with their flashing lights and screaming sirens.

Sergeant Pepper has a personal motto he lives by: "Nobody's coming: it's up to us." It's a bit of advice you can find tattooed on hardcore military guys with a doomsday complex (often the same guys who pick fights on Twitter about their Constitutional right to carry a semi-automatic into Walmart). It can also be seen in at least one spot in the police station, stitched in bold letters across a large flag pinned to the men's locker room wall. Or so I've been told. 

There definitely is wisdom in it: it's never a good idea to make yourself helpless by way of overreliance on those safety nets we take for granted. After all, those systems are, like the humans that created them, far from infallible. While the government has never (as far as we know) intentionally disabled emergency services, there have been times when 9-1-1 has failed-- and the frequency of these failures seems to be growing with every passing month. 

In April of 2014, over eleven million people across seven states lost access to 9-1-1 service as a result of a coding error by CenturyLink, their 9-1-1 service provider. The entire state of Washington was left to fend for itself during this time, unable to call for help even in the most dire of circumstances. Somewhere around 5,600 different callers were left wondering why 9-1-1 wasn't going through, including one resident by the name of Alicia Cappola.

While home alone with her five-year-old twins, Cappola suddenly found herself in a terrifying situation: somebody was trying to break into her house. Naturally, she did the most natural thing first: she called 9-1-1. But as call after call failed, she must have realized that she was on her own. After 37 failed attempts, she gave up, arming herself with a kitchen knife and confronting the intruder. 

Cappola confronted the intruder with her knife branded, and thankfully, she was successful in scaring him off. She was unable to make contact with emergency services until over an hour later, at which point the would-be thief had long since disappeared.

Similar outages have plagued the country over the years. 2017 saw one of the largest outages in the history of 9-1-1, with approximately 12,600 callers left unable to reach emergency services over the course of five hours. A string of cyber-attacks in 2018 struck hundreds of PSAPs across the country, costing millions and putting countless people out of reach of help. Just this year, outages have also hit Nevada, Nebraska, and South Dakota, Honolulu, parts of Texas and California*, and all of Massachusetts.

*It should be noted that the 2024 Bay Area outages were the result of copper wire thieves, which by itself isn't funny... but I'm just picturing someone in prison asking them, "What are you in for?" and their answer just being, "Oh, you know. I just stole 9-1-1."

In many cases, as soon as services were back up, the call volume spiked, mostly people who had seen the mass texts announcing the outage was fixed calling to see if it was, in fact, fixed. This led to many PSAPs being overwhelmed, often even further delaying responses to actual emergencies that occurred during and after the outage.**

**I think this goes without saying, but please, please don't do this.

Contrary to what our kindergarten teachers told us, 9-1-1 isn't infallible, and for some reason, it seems especially vulnerable to failure these days. Though no small amount of effort goes into keeping it up and running, at the end of the day it is still a human institution, and therefore is as fallible as we are.

However, I think it's also pertinent to take the Sarge's advice with a grain of salt. 

First of all, there is also a stark difference between "nobody will come" and "nobody knows to come". The scenario proposed by the Purge movies is one where emergency services are intentionally suspended, whereas real-life outages are usually failures of the technology. Somehow, to me, neglect of aid due to human error is a far less terrifying, since (a) it means that there's (probably) no grand conspiracy out to kill you, and (b) all you have to do to circumvent the problem is find an alternate way to communicate with emergency services.

That leads me to my second point: a failure of one link in the response chain does not necessarily spell doom. The goal of any emergency management or response agency is to have as many redundancies as possible, because our job is to anticipate and subvert the worst case scenarios. 

There are also standards in place meant to protect access to emergency services. Though some accessibility measures vary in quality and accessibility from region to region, others are mandated through federal legislation. For example, the FCC requires that unlisted phones (i.e. without active cell service) still be able to call 9-1-1. Pay phones (which do still exist, believe it or not) will be able to reach 9-1-1 even if you can't scrounge up a quarter. 

Most importantly, the vast majority of agencies have business lines along with 9-1-1. Where I work, dispatchers are trained to anticipate that an emergency can come from any line, so I always encourage people to save their local agencies' non-emergency numbers in their phones and write them on the fridge-- or better yet, memorize them. 

Essentially, short of every single phone tower in the region being simultaneously swallowed by the earth, the chances of ever being completely cut off from emergency services while in or near human civilization is slim to none, as long as you take the time to prepare for potential outages.

These outages can also serve as a reminder, however unpleasant, of what happens when we become complacent. As dispatchers, we are warned again and again against complacency. "Complacency Kills" is an unofficial tagline, reminding us that we are the safety net, both for the public and for our responders. But as a citizen, it's easier to take things for granted. It's never a good idea to have so much faith in the system that we neglect to prepare for potential disaster. 

Not this elaborate, though.

It is with this in mind that I am starting a new series, most likely to be updated intermittently with History Lessons with Dizzy. The new series, which I plan to call ISHTF ("If Shit Hits the Fan") will be investigative, looking into different aspects of emergency management and response, as well as speculative, coming up with plans that a hypothetical individual might take when preparing for large-scale disaster. 

I hope to cover topics such as how historical disasters were handled by emergency management agencies, the development, function, and limitations of EAS, and speculation on what I think would actually happen behind the dispatch desk if the apocalypse broke out tomorrow.

In the meantime, stay safe out there, and whatever you do... don't call 9-1-1 to see if it's working. Don't make me hunt you down next Purge. After all, I do have that night off.

For works cited, see here.