Tech giant Apple’s Emergency SOS via satellite feature on the iPhone helped rescue two women who were stranded in the Canadian province of British Columbia (BC).
The women found a highway closed due to an accident while returning to Alberta, Canada, so they chose to take the Holmes Forest Service Road after using Google Maps to find an alternate route, AppleInsider reports.
Eventually they came to where the grader had stopped, but the road was only partially plowed.
“It was basically a wall of snow then, and when they tried to get through it, they got stuck,” explained Dwight Yochim, senior manager at BC Search and Rescue.
Jochim also said they were about 12 miles down the road, stuck in the snow, not knowing where they were and out of cell service.
“There’s no cell service there, but one of them happened to have the new Apple phone that has SOS on it and activated SOS, and to my knowledge, that’s the first use of SOS in British Columbia,” he mentioned.
After the women used the feature, the RCMP and Robson Valley Search and Rescue used the GPS location to create an operation plan, determine what happened and conclude that the women may have taken the logging road.
“They found them, pulled their vehicle over and turned them around and got them back on the road,” Jochim said.
“It’s something that could potentially have saved their lives.” He also mentioned that without Emergency SOS, it could have taken the team more than a week to find the women, the report said.
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