Types of emergency#

Not five buttons — one button, and it asks what kind. That is the only question it ever asks, and the answers are configurable: rename them, drop one, add your own.

They exist for one reason: the category tells a neighbour what to bring and how fast to move before they’ve read a word.

Four of them are emergencies and make a noise in every house. The fifth doesn’t, and that’s the point of it.

A registered device has no options at all — one press, one alert, always an emergency, and the village finds out which kind when somebody arrives. That is a perfectly good outcome.

🚑 Medical#

A fall, a collapse, a stroke, a diabetic crisis, a chainsaw and a leg. Someone on the floor who can’t reach a phone.

112 first, always. Then press.
The useful things are unglamorous: open the door, put the outside light on, wait at the road for the ambulance, keep the person warm and talking, find the medication and the health card.
Don’t move anyone who has fallen unless they’re in danger where they lie.
This is the category with the hardest evidence behind it — GoodSAM exists because minutes decide cardiac arrests. A village that also arranges first-aid training and a defibrillator has done something worth more than any of the software here.

🔥 Fire#

A house, a chimney, a barn, a stubble field in August. Thirty minutes after our research was commissioned, a field went up outside the village.

A line of flame along the edge of a harvested cereal field, smoke drifting across a pale sky, a tractor with a water bowser and a few villagers standing well back. — A tractor, a bowser and people who know the tracks get there long before the bomberos do — and standing well back is part of the job. Illustration, generated. Not a real person or place.

112 first. Bomberos are a long way away, and the fire is not.
Numbers matter more here than in any other category: hands, water, tractors, somebody to move the animals and the gas bottles, somebody to knock on the doors downwind.
From safety only. Nobody enters a burning building. Nobody fights a field fire that has got above their own height.

🚔 Crime#

A break-in, a distraction theft, someone talking their way into a house in a hi-vis vest, a vehicle circling the village at three in the morning.

062 first — the Guardia Civil, not the group.
Observe and report. Never intervene, pursue or detain. Making yourself visible from a safe distance is the entire intervention, and it’s the one that works: people leave when they realise they’ve been seen.
Record behaviour and vehicles — plate, make, colour, direction. Never ethnicity or origin. This is both the law and, straightforwardly, the thing that helps the Guardia Civil. Why, in detail.
No photographs of people in the group or anywhere else. The AEPD fines are real.
Crime is one category among several, not the point of Escudo — why that matters.

🆘 Emergency#

The catch-all, for everything urgent that isn’t fire, medical or crime.

Nobody has seen Ana for two days and she isn’t answering. Whatever arrangement a village has for keeping an eye on people who live alone, this is where it comes out: nobody answering is the alert.
A missing person: a child, or someone with dementia who has walked off.
A tree down across the road, a burst main, a power cut with a cold house and a ninety-year-old in it.
Anything where you’d rather forty people knew now and apologise later.

It makes exactly as much noise as the other three. If you’re not sure whether it’s an emergency, it’s an emergency — false alarms are cheap and nobody is ever asked to explain one.

🤝 Ask for help#

The quiet one, and the reason this isn’t only an alarm system.

A door or a shutter that won’t open.
A ladder, a lift to Sahagún, a hand with something heavy.
Somebody to look at a leak before it becomes a flood.

An elderly woman in her doorway talking to a neighbour standing on the step with a loaf of bread under her arm. — The half of Escudo that never sounds an alarm at all. Illustration, generated. Not a real person or place.

This one arrives silently. Same group, same neighbours, no noise — it waits in the group until somebody looks at their phone, and it carries no emergency numbers, because it isn’t an emergency.

That’s not politeness, it’s what keeps the alarm working. People mute groups that make noise, and a muted group is the single biggest failure this system has. A quiet channel for ladders and lifts is what lets everyone leave the group audible all year, so that the night it really matters, forty phones go off.

It also removes the excuse. A woman who can’t get her door open won’t set off a village alarm over it, and shouldn’t have to — so she waits, and nobody knows. Now she has a button that costs nobody anything.

Choosing wrong doesn’t matter#

If it’s a fire that turns out to be a medical, or a crime that turns out to be nothing, the alert still reached the whole village and someone still went. The category is a hint, not a form. Press something.

The one worth getting right is the last one. Pedir ayuda makes no noise, so if somebody is on the floor it is the wrong button — and anyone who sees a quiet request that smells like an emergency should just raise a real one. No discussion, no apology.