False crash reports from skier iPhones flood Colorado ski town emergency dispatch centers - Summit Daily

Dispatchers astatine the Summit County 911 Center fielded 71 automated clang notifications from skiers’ iPhones and Apple watches astatine the county’s 4 skis areas past weekend. None of them progressive an emergency.

But each of them took clip to benignant out. If the skier did not reply a instrumentality call, a peculiar operations lawman contacted skis patrollers to cheque the determination of the automated call.

“We are not successful the signifier of disregarding calls,” said Trina Dummer, the interim manager of the Summit County 911 Center. “These calls impact a tremendous magnitude of resources, from dispatchers to deputies to skis patrollers. And I don’t deliberation we’ve ever had an existent exigency event.”

The “crash detection” and “fall detection” features connected the Apple iPhone 14 and watches automatically telephone 911 erstwhile the devices observe a abrupt halt that, successful concept, means the idiosyncratic has been progressive successful a car crash. The technology has been heralded for redeeming lives, but it’s not meshing good with skiers who tin halt abruptly and often autumn without the request for exigency help.

All of the automated 911 calls from skiers pouring into skis municipality exigency telephone centers this period — with a robot dependable sharing latitude and longitude coordinates of a perchance injured enactment — were astir snowy tumbles, not car wrecks. 

Read the afloat communicative for escaped astatine ColoradoSun.com.