I had a friend whose phone number was 591-1XXX and if I picked up the phone and dialed too fast, the 5 might not get recognized by the switch and I'd end up on 911, where I had to say "sorry, wrong number"
Tried dialing 112 once just to see what would happen, and it immediately connected me to 911. Interesting conversation with the dispatcher when I told them that I had not, in fact, dialed 911.
Numbers like 000 are a different matter, there are scenarios in which they might not work even if you're in Australia (when you have a non-australian SIM or no SIM at all, for example).
For more about this, see e.g.
https://nickvsnetworking.com/tales-from-the-trenches-emergen...
I use an old thrift store flip phone to make 911 calls when I would prefer to stay anonymous. 911 can even call you back using the IMEI!
Now you might speculate that it was kids playing or something, but based on the time(s) of the calls, the demographics of the island, etc. we always believed it was just some sort of phone malfunction.
On one serendipitous occasion the fault came from a school district I also support. The fault came from a contingency landline kept around in case the VoIP phone system lost digital PSTN connectivity. I was able to plug-in to the line w/ a butt set and hear clicky, buzzy, nightmarishly bad PSTN sounds thru it.
We turned it over to the ILEC and they "fixed" it. Given the number of "roadkill" splice pedestals I see in my area I feel pretty confident the ILEC isn't doing any maintenance of the copper cable plant at all. (It makes me pretty irritated, considering the favorable tax subsidies they received to build it.)
Yep. In a number of places the old ILEC's have publicly declared their intention to deprecate the old copper based PSTN. In other areas, they seem to be practicing a sort of "malicious neglect" and just letting it decay on the vine, to avoid spending money on maintenance.
https://crimejunkiepodcast.com/mysterious-death-davina-buff-...
https://www.southernfriedtruecrime.com/38-officer-davina-buf...
https://portcitydaily.com/local-news/2013/12/17/brunswick-da...
It's not unbelievable to me that water could get into one of these and "short out" one of these buttons.
FWIW, at one time (relative to here in the US at least) there were at least two different major "kinds" of payphones. COCOTS (Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephones)[1] and what I call (for lack of a better term) "telephone company payphones". The latter being owned and controlled by the local telco. Part of the difference is how signaling works. For a COCOT, it is the case that the line is a plain jane line, that you could - ahem cough theoretically cough - beige box onto and dial calls using DTMF or pulse dialing. For those phones, the "magic" that made it a "pay" phone was inside the phone itself. For the "telephone company payphones" the line was configured differently and tones were sent in-band over the line to tell the switch that the coins had been deposited. This is the idea behind the old "red box" notion of recording the coin tones and playing them back to get free calls.
So yeah, a COCOT line could almost certainly be subject to something like random shorts being interpreted as pulse dialing and could possibly call 911. For a telephone company payphone I'm less sure if those supported pulse dialing or not. The lack of coin tones shouldn't matter since calls to 911 are always free, but I'm not sure if the line was different in other ways as well, or not.
Which one the BHI phone was, I never knew. But this was in the late 90's and by then a lot of the old skool telephone company payphones had disappeared in favor of COCOT's so if I had to guess, I'd guess it was a COCOT.