London Has a “Fifty Shades of Grey” Problem
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Fuse/Thinkstock(LONDON) — The London Fire Brigade has a request: Please think before trying to emulate some of the things you’ve read about or seen in Fifty Shades of Grey.
Ahead of the movie’s release this weekend, the Brigade announced Thursday that its chiefs were “concerned” that the film “could lead to more people being stuck or trapped in objects like handcuffs or rings” because emergency calls about these things have increased since the book was published in 2011.
Officials said that the Fire Brigade responds to at least one “embarrassing incident” a day.
“For example, in November last year firefighters came to the rescue of a man forced to undergo surgery to remove two metal rings that had been stuck on his penis for three days,” the London Fire Brigade said in a statement.
The man went to an emergency room at a London hospital “in the early hours but when doctors found they couldn’t remove the steel rings they called the Brigade. Two firefighters scrubbed up and removed the rings using pedal cutters — a hydraulic handheld piece of cutting equipment,” the Fire Brigade said in its statement.
So they started the “50 Shades of Red” campaign to urge caution.
“The Fifty Shades effect seems to spike handcuff incidents so we hope film goers will use common sense and avoid leaving themselves red faced,” Fire Brigade Officer Dave Brown said in the statement. “I’d like to remind everyone that 999 is an emergency number and should only be used as such. If there’s a genuine emergency, fire crews will of course attend and will be on the scene to help within minutes.”
Britain’s 999 is the equivalent of 911 in the U.S.
ABC News called emergency responders at six major U.S. cities, but those agencies could not determine whether they had experienced a similar Fifty Shades phenomenon.
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