ADELAIDE, Australia, Sept. 8 (UPI) -- Australian authorities said two girls lost in a drainage well system used their phones to update their Facebook statuses instead of calling police.

Glenn Benham, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Fire Service in Adelaide, said the girls, ages 10 and 12, posted Facebook updates saying they were lost in a storm drain in the city's south suburbs and a friend who noticed the updates called police, Britain's The Daily Telegraph reported Tuesday.


The girls were rescued at 7:30 p.m. and did not require medical attention, emergency responders said.

"It is a worry for us because it causes a delay on us being able to rescue the girls," Benham told the Australian Broadcasting Corp. "If they were able to access Facebook from their mobile phones, they could have called 000 (the Australian emergency number), so the point being they could have called us directly and we could have got there quicker than relying on someone being online and replying to them and eventually having to call us via 000 anyway."