Darryl & Sara Pivac Alexander, a Deaf couple living in Wellington, live in a house that overlooks a valley. On the afternoon of December 23, Darryl & Sara noticed billowing smoke below them in the valley.

They commented it looked serious, and Sara said she would walk over to their neighbours and ask them to phone 111.Darryl looked at her strangely and reminded her “No, we can text 111!”.Sara realised she had not yet registered with the Police for the TXT Service, but she was still determined to ask the hearing neighbour to phone the Fire Service.

She went over to the neighbours while Darryl stayed in their house and texted 111 alerting the Fire Service to the huge smoke in the valley. A few minutes later, Darryl went and found Sara, their neighbour as well as a few other people standing around on the street looking at the huge smoke. Darryl showed them all the text message from the 111 TXT Service about the fire: Darryl was told that it was a hut fire and it was currently being seen to.

The hearing people standing on the street did not know this information! Shortly afterwards, Sara completed her registration with the Police and now in future can text about an emergency if she needs to.

This is a good reminder for us all that emergencies can happen at anytime,and to ensure each of us can ask for help, we need to be registered with both Deaf Aotearoa & the Police. As at January 2011, there were over 800 people registered with Deaf Aotearoa, yet only 525 had completed the 2nd part of the registration process, which was to register on the Police’s website. We want to see everyone complete this process!

Remember, if you are having trouble with the 2nd part of the registration process, you can ask Deaf Aotearoa to assist you with this, or a friend or family member.