Who you gonna call when your phone goes down the gurgler? Firefighters, of course

Firefighters, of course. When Zalda and Ralph Keall arrived for their weekly 10am mahjong game they realised something was missing – Zalda’s cellphone.

So they went back to their car to look for it. Not there. Had Zalda dropped it? But it wasn’t on the footpath or in the gutter, the only likely places it could be. But there was a drain close by.

Zalda then recalled she had heard something when she got out of the car.

“I had it (phone) sitting on my lap. I had heard a clunk,” she said.

They looked in the drain but the discoloured water obscured what might be in it. And the grill covering the drain was firmly wedged in place.

So there was only one option, given they desperately needed to find the phone with all of Zalda’s contacts stored on it: Call 111 and ask if the fire service could help.

The emergency operator said they could not dispatch firefighters to look for a cellphone in a drain. It was hardly a life or death scenario, usually the benchmark for 111 calls.

But the Lincoln fire station was only a short distance away from the mahjong venue in the restaurant at The Famous Grouse Hotel. So the operator contacted the station to see how they might be placed.

Lincoln station officer Ollie Rutland-Sims weighed up the request and on the basis it was quiet and on a public holiday when most volunteers on call wouldn’t be working, the siren was sounded.

“We’re a one-stop emergency service. It was a classic feel good story,” he told The Star.

Firefighter Jayne Henare first used her hands to fish for the phone, before tools were employed to sweep deeper into the drain. After several attempts it came up amongst the muck, very dirty and wet, but still working.

The Kealls said they were very grateful for the firefighters retrieving the phone – a huge relief, said Ralph.