Glynis Ratcliffe and her husband were enjoying a good night’s rest earlier this week, until they got an unexpected wake-up call at their front door around 5:30 a.m. A Durham Regional police officer was on Ratcliffe’s step and a Whitby fire department pumper truck sat on the street outside her Whitby, Ont. home.
The officer asked Ratcliffe if anything was wrong, since emergency dispatchers had received two 911 calls from the family home.
“I said, ‘We’re in bed now, I can’t explain how that would happen,'” Ratcliffe said, at a loss to understand how calls could originate from the family’s landline telephone, which wasn’t even working.
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Ratcliffe and her husband moved into the Whitby house in June. At the time, Bell technicians installed a landline, which she says is “not a primary use phone, just a back up” since there are three children at home.
The couple used to live in a Toronto neighbourhood where power outages were routine so they wanted a phone in case cell phones couldn’t be charged.
But with their phones still packed in boxes until this week, the couple hadn’t tested the line themselves and instead made use of their cellular phones all summer.
When the couple tried to get the phone line to work on Monday, they couldn’t get a dial tone for either a rotary phone or wireless one.
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The couple left one of the phones plugged into the wall and awaited a service appointment with a Bell technician. Then, early Tuesday morning, police and fire crews arrived at the home.
Ratcliffe said the female police officer asked her if they’d recently installed a phone line in their home. When Ratcliffe said they had, she says the officer understood almost immediately.
“Sometimes these weird 911 calls happen when a line has been installed,” the officer told Ratcliffe, who later relayed her experience on Facebook. She said she was surprised to see that other posters had also experienced phantom 911 calls from their landline phones.
“One person had their door broken down because they weren’t home when the phone call was made,” said Ratcliffe, grateful that police did arrive at her door to check things out — and more appreciative that her door was intact.
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So what was the cause of the 911 calls? Global News asked Bell Canada to investigate — and the company did.
“We looked into the situation and it appears a damaged cable relayed a pulsing tone that was mistaken for a 911 call,” said Caroline Audet, a company spokesperson.
“It’s a very rare occurrence and Bell technicians have since repaired the damaged cable.”
Bell also said a customer representative will be in touch with Ratcliffe and her husband to reimburse the $44 per month they had been paying for non-existent phone service since June.
While Bell says calls like these are rare, emergency officials in Durham Region say they occur on an occasional basis.
Until recently, a representative said the service would get a couple of calls a week. Now, they receive about two calls a month.
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