Definitely. I think especially emergency=yes/no should not be used anywhere, but rather be replaced with more meaningfull taggs. --AndiG88 (talk) 00:42, 14 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
The existing, unfortunate use of emergency=yes is to indicate in amenity=hospital a hospital that has a department to deal with emergencies (US: emergency room, UK: accidents and emergency, DE: Notaufnahme, etc.). Suggestion: how about tagging such hospitals with emergency=hospital instead of emergency=yes? The idea is that all objects with an emergency=* key should indicate facilities available for dealing with emergencies, and the value should indicate what that facility is. This would allow easy search for all nearby emergency facilities, including hospital emergency rooms. The emergency=hospital property should perhaps best be assigned with the building or entrance closest to the emergency department, e.g. its reception, not with the entire hospital campus and all its many non-emergency facilities, to help users find it in case of emergency. Markus Kuhn (talk) 20:53, 22 October 2014 (UTC)Reply
Where do you see the advantage? On the one hand I like the idea, but looking closer at it I found a lot of things confusing. Like land can mean a lot of things and also for water there can be a big difference between lifeguard and coastguard.--AndiG88 (talk) 07:37, 17 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
To me the 'emergency service' is not a place to go to get emergency help, rather they are the places help gets sent from. And the wiki page has amenity=hospital .. that is not necessarily a service place for an emergency. Warin61 (talk) 06:58, 25 October 2015 (UTC)Reply
highway=emergency_access_point
Latest comment: 12 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
Yes there is a difference: the emergency=phone is for the phone box you find along roads, tunnels, or in dangerous areas. These phones can be used to make a toll-free call to a unique emergency center. You don't need to know any number, and you are immediately geolocalized.
The 3 other keys (in headings) are most probably not needed if they are meant to indicate a phone number:
Emergency services are callable over a very wide area which may span a full country, or even a whole continent
In Europe, just call 112 from any phone, including a mobile phone without a SIM card or with no credits, or a mobile phone that is locked by the operator (this call is toll free for everyone). All smartphones sold in Europe have builtin firware accepting this number. There are also other nationwide emergency numbers for more specialized emergencies (police, doctor, firemen), that mobile phones will also route for free. Those numbers will be routed to an available local emergency service everyday in the year and 24/24, but this is always the same number. So these numbers are not geolocalized.
very specific emergency numbers are those only usable in private areas, they are not necessarily always available. These numbers may also not be usable without connecting to the internal phone network.
with the huge development of nationwide emergency services and the standardization of their call number, it is not recomended to call directly a local emergency service (it could perturbate the management, deployment and coordination of various emergency services, and you are in fact not sure to find them available at a local phone number).
Perhaps emergency_number rather than code? Emergency phone numbers change around the world, 911, 999, 000 for instance. The only constant phone number exists for cell phones 112. Warin61 (talk) 08:38, 5 October 2015 (UTC)Reply
Note: 112 is not just for cell phones. It can be used on any phone connected to the public network. Buit for emergency phones found along rods you really should use them (internall they are also using cell phone, but the call is automated and routed to the best service that can help you fast in your area, and they can take additional measures to prevent further accidents, such as closing roads and reserving access to emergency services, in order to speed up the help they can provide to the caller, the victims to assist and other people around or the environment). — Verdy_p(talk)17:05, 19 September 2016 (UTC)Reply
Emergency phones exist at various places .. usually connecting to the service provider (bridge, highway for example). The is an emergency radio phone that connects to the Royal Flying Doctor Service in the middle of the Simpson Desert in Australia .. about 300 km from the nearest help over many sand dunes for example. Warin61 (talk) 08:38, 5 October 2015 (UTC)Reply
amenity=* vs. emergency=*
Latest comment: 11 years ago6 comments5 people in discussion
I kinda have a problem with police, because for example Federal_Criminal_Police_Office_(Germany) (I guess it's compareable to the FBI and NCA) has very little to do with emergency. Maybe the question is, if it is a police station in the fist place or we should actually use different tags like office=government.--AndiG88 (talk) 06:40, 17 June 2014 (UTC)Reply
The features which are stations for emergency services do not necessarily offer an immediate response. In rural Australia, most fire- and ambulance-stations are not permanently manned, and arriving at them and wanting immediate assistance is a false expectation. They should all be tagged amenity=police, amenity=ambulance_station or amenity=fire_station so rendering can show what they are, then addbut change it to eg: emergency=policeif you can arrive and expect immediate help. This should ideally change the rendering, but I'm not sure how to achieve this in a universal way. The idea is that anything labelled with emergency=*, be it a fire hose, a call button, a roadside phone or a manned station, should be able to provide (or give quick contact with) immediate help.
Possibly the rendering and tagging should be approached the same as hospital where the emergency part is tagged as a sub tag to the main key .. rendering could then be a background colour to the main rendering .. red perhaps Warin61 (talk) 08:45, 5 October 2015 (UTC)Reply
Life Ring, Lifebelt, Lifebuoy
Latest comment: 11 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
There are not only floating rings which are designed for rescuing people out of the water, you can also find some kind of poles with a hook or a ring at the end, floating balls with a net around them to grap them, ladders, etc. I've also seen small rescue boats near a boat lock. (http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kategorie:Wasserrettungsmittel)
Latest comment: 11 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion
Hi there,
as I noticed, that there seems to be some interest by externals to learn about this topic and because OSM already has some interested users, I would like to suggest to create some landing page for the topic? IMHO it's worth to consider emergency as general page that gives an overview to (external) users and points them to the right directions (e.g. emergency=*, existing projects, aspects for special interest groups as firefighters / rescue squads / ...). So is there already a plan to create an overview that is not just on tagging, but on 'promoting' or summarizing this aspect of OSM? --!i!10:55, 2 November 2014 (UTC)Reply
Defibrillators
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
Hi all! Just a question: is there the rendering for defibrillators on the OSM standard layer? If not, is it possible to add? --Yiyi (talk) 23:17, 18 June 2015 (UTC)Reply
But it's rendered on the French renderer as you can see here, starting at zoom level 17.
As the French renderer is a fork of the global renderer, you can suggest to integrate this part to the trunk, it should be straight-forward. --Nospam2005 (talk) 20:33, 18 July 2017 (UTC)Reply
Civil Defence/Civil Protection/Disaster response
Latest comment: 9 years ago3 comments3 people in discussion
In almost all countries exist an organisation that provides emergency help in situations of collective risk, extraordinary catastrophe or public disaster, usually called Civil Defence or Civil Protection (Civil defense on Wikipedia). Now it can be tagged emergency=ses_station, where SES stands for the Australian State Emergency Service. It's not very used probably because of the Australian name, so I think something more international should be created, for example emergency=civil_protection or civil_protection_base or station.
I fully agree. The terms "civil protection" being the most common apparently and much less obscure than the Australian-specific "SES" acronym.
However note that some countries have several parallel systems for handling emergency situations: e.g. one for natural disasters (earthquakes, storms and hurricanes, flowings...), another for health emergencies, another for maritime emergencies, another for air emergencies, another for industrial disasters, and they don't always have the same compentences.
In addition there are civil organizations (which are fine within "civil protection"), and military organizations (which are more related to "civil defence"). Some countries are associated both (e.g. in France the firemen in Paris and Marseille have military status, all permanently employed, where everywhere else they are civil servants, with a significant number of them acting voluntarily in parallel of their regular job, even if there are permanent employees for managing the structures with strong relations with local collectivities and local representants of the national state, i.e. prefects).
Some emergency services are also completely private even if they have a public service mission (e.g. maritime emergency in France, by the "Société Nationale de Sauvetage en Mer", alias SNSM, which is corporate because it can act in relation with military authorities, but still very unique as a private corporation as it receives donations from the public, in addition to money from civil authorities, and maritime companies). Some are civil associations without any commerical goal (e.g. emergency in moutain by corporate associations of montain guides, often working with other associations managing natural parks). However in France, all these services are coordinated by "Protection Civile" (which also operates the nationwide emergency toll-free call number "112", the same number being used throughout Europe, which can then pilot the cases and drive them to medical assistance by phone, contact doctors, hospitals, call ambulances, the police, firemen, or many other kind of emergency services, including the armies and state authorities, or corporate services such as gas/electricity energy providers/producers).
Many emergency services are in fact regular divisions of national or regional police services (the civil "police" in most cities, or a military "gendarmerie" in rural areas, both also making civil investigations for the civil justice), with seasonal activities (e.g. security on beaches or in mountain resorts).
Why are there so many actors? Simply because this is mandatory by law, in all organizations with a minimum number of people, or in events inviting the public, to organize the security and emergency, with trained people, physical equipments, and internal security rules that they must make visible and known to anyone going there. Training enough people is generally the most important problem in many countries, it is a permanent need, independantly of the permanent existence (operating 365/365 and 24/24) of national or regional emergency coordination services. — Verdy_p(talk)18:31, 12 October 2016 (UTC)Reply
No, I am removing these pointless banners. In general, on encountering pointless banners the best option is to remove them (also, fix issue quickly if there is any). Otherwise we risk ending we absurdity of people wasting massive amounts of time on tagging with banners without leading to any improvements, with false feeling of doing something useful - happens on Wikipedia Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:27, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
I do agree: banners posted without any proposal for changes in the talk page (explaining why things can't be fixed easily) are pointless. If there are real problems, they must be explained. There may be very temporary banners only for real work in progress, where not much is still explained in the talk page. The reason for a banner can also be the existence of a discussion elsewhere, but the location of this discussion taking place should also be stated in the talk page (this could be a voting page when there are several conflicting alternatives for the fixes to apply). Banners could also be set on unfinished work (e.g. unfininished translations), or for pages that need updates (e.g. an, initially translated page that is missing lots of improvbements added in another language, with additional info people may be interesting: it's not awlays easy to fix the page itself if one needs to understand the language or if the additions made alsewhere are very technical). Some banners may be present because of polical problems with conflicting views depending on the language used (where a majority of editors in a language vote for something that are important for them, but other editors in other languages think this is not important or false
It's sometimes difficult/long to reach an agreement or compromize, until one finds an idea to represent both views). Cultural differences are also not easy to distinguish in English is English is considered the "common" view: some English pages are very British-centered even though they attempt to describe features used worldwide with a clearly different pattern of usages (e.g. crossings)... Here for emergencies, the situation is complicated by the fact that various countries have different legal requirements and classifications. — Verdy_p(talk)10:58, 17 April 2018 (UTC)Reply
Technical Rescue
Latest comment: 6 years ago2 comments2 people in discussion
I saw mentioned where a technical rescue station was going to be tagged emergency_service=technical_rescue which seemed to be undefined on the wiki. The emergency_service key doesn't seem to be defined, either. I wonder if we can define this as we have the ambulance station. Thoughts? --Sparks (talk) 23:30, 7 June 2020 (UTC)Reply