Munich dispatchers relay Italian emergencies, seek European network

Munich firefighters have helped coordinate medical emergencies in Italy on two consecutive days, BR reported. The cases have renewed calls for a Europe-wide system linking emergency control centres.

Both incidents involved the same woman, who collapsed while on holiday in Bibione on Italy’s Adriatic coast. On Monday morning, her 11-year-old daughter called her father in Munich, who then contacted German emergency services. Several agencies helped ensure the woman was taken to hospital.

The woman collapsed again on Tuesday, according to the Munich fire service. The information was again passed through the same chain of contacts.

Such cross-border emergency calls reach Munich’s Integrated Control Centre from time to time. Staff were able to call the emergency control centre in Bolzano, Italy, which serves as their first point of contact for Italy because it has staff who speak both German and Italian, fire service spokesman Bernhard Peschke said.

The Bolzano centre has also helped when emergency calls from Munich were received in Italy. Munich’s control centre can draw on multilingual colleagues and, if necessary, contact staff at an embassy, Peschke said.

However, calling emergency services in Germany from abroad should only be a last resort. Peschke said the fastest and most direct option is to call 112 and describe the situation in reasonably good English. The number is free and used throughout Europe, where emergency staff should generally speak English.

Nuremberg’s Integrated Control Centre has also worked with foreign authorities. In 2023, a group of hikers caught in a storm on a mountain on the Spanish island of Tenerife contacted a friend in Nuremberg through a messaging service. She called the emergency number, and the Nuremberg centre forwarded the call.

The hikers were eventually found and rescued. Before that, however, Nuremberg staff had to search online for contact details for Madrid police, who then passed the case to the local authority.

Marc Gistrichovsky, head of the Nuremberg fire service’s Integrated Control Centre, said German emergency centres lacked a Europe-wide directory showing how to reach control centres in other countries.

Florian Schroffenegger, a senior fire inspector at the Bolzano fire service, also supports such a directory and a network of multilingual control centres. Medical and firefighting terms can be difficult to translate, he said, making access to a bilingual control centre the best option.

Schroffenegger said he and his colleagues had already provided translation assistance about 50 times this year. Even so, he said calling 112 directly was generally the best option, because contacting an emergency centre in one’s home country can cause delays that may be critical in an emergency.