When I Was Young

UNHELPFUL HELPLINE

SYDNEY — A dying teenage boy lost in dense bushland outside Sydney was ridiculed by emergency service operators during his frantic calls for help.

David Iredale, 17, became separated from his friends during a three-day bush walk in the Blue Mountain in 2006.

After spending 24 hours without water, he made six increasingly desperate calls to the emergency services.

However, David’s explanation that he was lost, feeling faint and had no water was met with sarcasm and derision by the emergency call centre staff.

During the conversations, call centre workers repeatedly asked David for a street address, despite his explanation he was lost in the bush, nowhere near a named road.

In one call, David explained his situation, to which the operator responded: “Okay, so you’ve just walked into the middle of nowhere?”

Another operator took two calls from the schoolboy but didn’t appear to remember her previous conversation.

In his final call, he apologised for failing to remember the name of the track he was on because he was too disoriented. David repeated the word “sorry”, to which the operator abruptly responded: “Don’t keep saying that... tell me where you are.”

The teenager was also put on hold twice. After his sixth call to the service, he was never heard from again. Eight days later his body was found by rescue teams in a dry creek bed.

David’s parents left the court while the harrowing recordings were played.

The New South Wales Ambulance Service has apologised for the way it treated David and issued a statement saying it had changed its procedures for handling calls from people in remote locations. The Daily Telegraph

From TODAY, World – 20-April-2009