Subscribe | UPI Odd Newsletter Subscribe LONDON, June 30 (UPI) -- England celebrated 70 years of emergency 999 telephone service Saturday with calls reporting a pair of missing trousers, a toothache and a broken fingernail. The colors above London's famous BT Tower were to change to blue and white, simulating an ambulance's flashing light, in tribute to the 999, The Independent reported. Advertisement The service handles nearly 336,000 genuine emergencies a week and has saved thousands of lives, but it also receives about 224,000 calls a week that never should have been made, the British newspaper said. There was the man who lost his trousers, the teenager with a toothache and the model with a broken fingernail, all examples of the growing problem of unnecessary or bogus calls wasting telephone operators' time. The 999 service was born in London in 1937 after five women died in a fire. A neighbor had dialed 0 to alert the local telephone exchange, but the call was held in the queue because the operator had no way of knowing it was urgent, The Independent said.
