Bavarian rescuers relay emergency calls to Italy as Europe seeks better links

Bavarian rescuers have helped relay emergency calls to Italy in two cases on the Adriatic, BR reported, highlighting the need for a Europe-wide system linking emergency control centres.

In both incidents, the Munich fire service helped the same patient after she collapsed in Bibione on Italy’s Adriatic coast. Her 11-year-old daughter first called her father in Munich, who then contacted German emergency services. Several agencies helped arrange the woman’s treatment at a hospital. When she collapsed again the next day, the information followed the same route.

Such cross-border calls reach Munich’s integrated emergency control centre, which receives emergency calls from the region, from time to time. Staff were able to call the control centre in Bozen, where German and Italian are both spoken. Bernhard Peschke, a fire service spokesman, described it as the first point of contact for cases involving Italy. The Bozen 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 an embassy for translation help. But Peschke said people abroad should normally call 112 directly and explain the situation in reasonably clear English. The number is free and used across Europe, where emergency operators should generally speak English.

Nuremberg’s integrated emergency control centre has also worked with authorities abroad. In 2023, a group of hikers caught in a storm on a mountain on the Spanish island of Tenerife contacted a friend in Nuremberg via a messaging service. She called the emergency number, and the control centre passed on the call. The hikers were eventually found and rescued, but staff first had to search online for the contact details of Madrid police, which then forwarded the case to the local authority.

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

Florian Schroffenegger, a senior fire inspector at the Bozen fire service, also supports such a network. He said bilingual control centres were particularly useful because medical and firefighting terminology could be difficult to translate. Schroffenegger said his colleagues had already provided translation assistance about 50 times this year.

Both Bavarian and Bozen rescuers stressed that contacting the emergency control centre directly is normally the fastest option. Calling a control centre in the home country can cause delays that may be critical in an emergency.