On Feb. 2 an employee of an emergency line in Zaporizhzhya failed to provide information on the nearest bomb shelter to a caller. Unfortunately, the caller happened to be Ukraine's prime minister.
While in Zaporizhzhya on an official visit, Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk tried to call the emergency number 101 – an alternative to the U.S. 911 line. But the line turned out to be not helpful.
Sitting at a meeting of the National Commission for Emergency Situations that took place in Zaporizhzhya on Feb. 2, Yatseniuk seemed to patiently listen to the local officials’ report on security. When it was his turn to speak, he looked dissatisfied.
“And now let me tell you how it happens in real life,” he said, holding a mobile phone in his hand.
Yatsenyuk claimed that he made a call to the emergency line during the speech of a previous participant.
“I said ‘Hello, my name is Arsen. I’m at Lenin Avenue. Could you please tell me where the closest bomb shelter is?'” he recited his call. “You know what I was told? ‘We don’t have this information. Call city hall or local authorities.'”
Disappointed, Yatsenyuk said: “Our whole work is worth nothing. I think that if I sit down and call all the hot lines, half of them will give me similar responses.”
Then Yatsenyuk demanded that local authorities make a list of 20 probable security-related questions and instruct the emergency services on how to answer them.
