Doom in western France where emergency service telephone lines were shut down
A 28-month- old infant died at his home in western France during the emergency services’ telephone lines , the local authorities announced today.
Vendé prefect Benoit Brocard said the child had died at the scene this morning, citing a “tragedy” as a result of the breakdown at the helpline.
” It seems that there are doubts about the consequences of this malfunction. “It is legitimate and that is why we requested an administrative inquiry ,” Brocard added.
According to the head of the local health service, Jean-Jacques Quaple, the emergency medical center received a call at 8.21 in the morning. The child’s mother ” tried unsuccessfully for an hour to call telephone lines 18 and 15 “.
He managed to catch a line when he used a ten-digit phone number . At 8.22 the community fire service and emergency physicians responded.
At the same time, a doctor was giving telephone instructions to the mother to provide first aid to her child, who suffered a heart attack.
The child did not succeed: he was pronounced dead at 9.25, in his family home. A fault in France’s telephone network on Wednesday afternoon left many people across the country unable to contact emergency services until midnight.
The judicial authoritiesAn investigation will also be launched into the death, also of opposition, of a 63-year-old man in the city of Van, in western France.
The Interior Minister Zeral Ntarmanen , who hurriedly returned from a visit to Tunisia, along with Prime Minister Jean Kastex, announced this morning that a patient suffering from cardiovascular problems died after “failed to call on relief services ‘and spoke of’ serious and unacceptable malfunction “.
“Two similar incidents were reported on the island of Reunion in the Indian Ocean. Darmanen’s associates clarified that these two “events” resulted in the death of the patients.
” What is certain is that these people said they tried to call several times and did not succeed immediately ,” Darmanen added.
The general manager of the telecommunications company Orange , Stefan Richard, apologized “to all those who were affected in the last hours” for the problem, after he had been called to the Ministry of Interior earlier. Speaking on the private television channel TF1, Richard completely ruled out the possibility that the company had fallen victim to a cyber attack. He explained that the most likely reason for the problem was that there was some “software malfunction in critical network equipment”.
Orange had previously reported that there was a problem with a “router-type device”, the device that forwards telephone calls.
