Apple rolled out its new Satellite Emergency SOS feature for iPhone 14 users in November, and we’ve already seen several reports of the feature being used in the real world. A new story from Canada today offers another example of 911 satellite SOS helping to save the lives of two women stranded in the wild after an incident on Google Maps…
iPhone 14’s emergency SOS via satellite saves the day
As reported by The Times Colonist, the two women were returning home from a trip to Alberta when they got lost near McBride, a small village in British Columbia, Canada. On the way home, an accident caused the main road to be closed, so the women looked on Google Maps for an alternative route.
Google Maps took them down a side road in Holmes Forest. This access road had only been “partially plowed” after several snowstorms, which the women were unaware of as they entered the road.
They drove about 20 kilometers down the road, according to search and rescue authorities, before hitting a “wall of snow” that indicated where the plow had stopped and got stuck. Because they were so far down an access road in a forest, no cell service was available. However, one of the women had an iPhone 14 and was considering using the new emergency SOS feature via satellite.
The iPhone 14 allowed them to send a message and their location to an Apple call center. From there, Apple’s call center contacted the “Northern911” call center in Canada, which then activated a call to emergency response teams in British Columbia. This newest rescue team received an “information packet” with GPS coordinates.
Search and rescue personnel including the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the British Columbia Search and Rescue Team and the Robson Valley Search and Rescue Team were able to locate the two women using GPS coordinates. They pulled the vehicle out of the snow and helped it turn and back onto the freeway.
“A Game Changer”
Dwight Yochim, an executive at British Columbia Search and Rescue, said he believes this is the “first deployment” of the new capability in British Columbia.
There is no cell service there but one of them had the new apple phone with SOS and turned on SOS and as far as I know this is the first use of SOS in Colombia – British.
If they didn’t have that, family or their work would have happened, they would have said “hey, they didn’t show up” and so the search area would have been where they were last seen, where they should be and it would have been several hundred miles can be removed.
“Something like this could possibly save her life,” Yochim continued. “It’s a game changer.” This technology has the potential to really help us save lives and reduce the time it takes to save lives.
For comparison: Yochim estimates that his team conducts around 1,700 to 1,800 searches per year. The Satellite Emergency SOS on the iPhone 14 can significantly reduce the number. “If we know exactly where the subject is, all we have to do is go inside and rescue it,” Yochim said.
Learn more about using Satellite Emergency SOS on iPhone 14 with our comprehensive guide.
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