The moment the Romanians in danger will have the possibility to dial a three-digit number to have the Police, the Fire Department or the Ambulance come to their rescue in a matter of minutes, as in the American movies, has been postponed.
The Communications and Information Technology Ministry (MCTI) on Wednesday announced it would terminate the contract with Canadian consortium Romanian Public Safety, which had pledged to build the 112 unified emergency call system in Romania in the fall of 2001. Why such a decision? Because the Canadians failed to keep their end of the bargain, a MCTI release shows.
MCTI had sent a letter to the consortium in July last year, requesting that the emergency response centres for Bucharest and Valea Prahovei should become operational by the end of 2002, which did not happen.
Minister Dan Nica was to propose "a set of measures" during yesterday's Government session in order to make the 112 national unified emergency call system operational for Bucharest, Valea Prahovei and the Black Sea Coast until June 2003.
The Romanian Public Safety Consortium is run by the Canadian company Positron, which has previously developed such emergency systems in cities and communities in North and South America, Asia and Africa.
Romanian Public Safety Inc. was the only company to have submitted a bid for the 112 system. It pledged to find and invest $42.5 million during its negotiations with the Romanian State, as well as to provide the state-of-the-art technology, equipment and training for the Romanian personnel, required by the operation of the system.
The Special Telecommunications Service (STS) is supposed to operate this system, which has stirred certain controversies. In order to identify the location of the caller and avoid misuse of the system by practical jokers, every telephony company in Romania was required to provide STS with their databases (subscriber name, telephone number and address) before the system became operational. The requirement caused unrest, but the Communications Ministry at the time explained this was how the European emergency service system worked and reassured the data would not be abusively used by STS.
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