A combination of Crash Detection and Apple’s Emergency SOS via satellite on an iPhone helped to guide rescuers to the driver, reports AppleInsider.
The man’s car went over a cliff and dropped 400 feet before crashing to a halt.
“He was 400 feet down in a canyon with virtually no way out,” said Steve Goldsworthy, the Rescue Operations Leader of Montrose Search and Rescue.
“So, who knows when, or if, we would’ve located him.”
“The location that we got from the iPhone activation was spot on,” Goldsworthy added.
Goldsworthy further explained, “It was basically his phone on its own, calling for help on his behalf.”
“I believe that if we didn’t have that good location information in a timely manner, he probably would’ve bled out,” said Mike Leum, one of the
members of Montrose Search and Rescue.
In January, it was reported that the Emergency SOS via satellite feature on iPhone had helped to save two women who were stranded in Canadian Province ‘British Columbia’ (BC).
The women found that a highway was closed because of an accident while they were returning to Alberta, Canada, so they chose to take the Holmes Forest Service Road after using Google Maps to find an alternate route.
They eventually arrived at the spot where the grader had stopped, but the road was only partially ploughed.
“Then it was basically a wall of snow and when they tried to get through it, they got stuck,” explained Dwight Yochim, senior manager with BC Search
and Rescue.
“There’s no cell service there but one of them happened to have the new Apple phone that has the SOS in it and activated the SOS and to my
knowledge, that’s the first use of the SOS in British Columbia,” Yochim added.
Later, the rescue team found them, pulled their vehicle out and got them turned around and back on the way.
–IANS
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