Around 60% of roads in the capital Doha have been equipped with surveillance cameras and work is on to install such equipment on other roads as well, an official has said. Colonel Saeed Hassan al-Mazroui, director, Control Room (operations department) at the National Command Centre, said cameras have also been installed on main roads in places outside Doha, such as Al Khor, Al Sheehaniyah, Al Wakrah, Mesaieed and others, according to local daily Al Sharq.
Colonel al-Mazroui said around 80% of the calls made to the Emergency Services Section of the Ministry of Interior – at 999 – are about non-emergency issues mostly concerning complaints and security-related queries. The section receives 5,000-6,000 calls a day and only some 20% of these are calls pertaining to emergencies and critical cases such as road accidents and fires, he added.
The 999 service is provided through 150 lines and the rules followed in dealing with such calls include specifying the type of report, locating the site of the incident, asking for the necessary information and determining the entities concerned in a particular case in order to transfer the report to them through the Control Room, according to the daily. The department has interpreters for English, French, Tagalog, Urdu, Pashto, Bengali and Persian, the official added.
Further, he stressed that the emergency service for the deaf (992) has excelled at the regional and international levels. The service enables people with hearing disabilities to communicate through video calls with sign language, and they can also use SMSes and e-mails to report an emergency and ask for help.
