Lowly cell phone 'ping' becomes crucial clue to rescuers
By
SARAH SKIDMORE Associated Press Writer
Summary
T-Mobile spokesman Peter Dobrow said his company works daily with law enforcement officers to help locate people in life-and-death situations. He said the company has been working around the clock with searchers on Mount Hood.
Story Published: Dec 13, 2006 at 4:06 PM PDT
Story Updated: Dec 13, 2006 at 4:06 PM PDT
A "ping" is essentially a signal sent from a cell phone to a provider tower or vice versa.
Oregon rescue officials said a ping from a family cell phone was critical in narrowing the search for the James Kim family in the mountains of Southern Oregon last week. James Kim died of hypothermia, but his wife and their two children were rescued.
This week, rescue workers are again working with cell phone signals - this time in their search for three climbers who've gone missing on Mount Hood.
A phone must be on and in a coverage area to register a ping, either by sending or receiving a signal. Once a ping is registered, a cell phone provider can narrow the location of a handset based on the location of the receiving cell towers.
T-Mobile spokesman Peter Dobrow said his company works daily with law enforcement officers to help locate people in life-and-death situations. And he said the company has been working around the clock with searchers on Mount Hood.
"The ping is essentially the handset's way of saying: 'I'm here and I'm ready to be used,' " Dobrow said.
Mount Hood has limited cell phone coverage. But one of the missing climbers, Kelly James, was able to place a phone call on Sunday to his family from a snow cave to say the group was in trouble.
Using that information and pings sent every five or 10 minutes by T-Mobile to the phone over two days, the company was able to determine a roughly quarter-mile area where the handset may be located.
Normally, a provider uses the three closest towers to triangulate an area where a person may be located. However, James' phone was at the periphery of cell phone coverage area and registered to only one tower. But based on the region of the tower that it hit, T-Mobile was able to narrow down the possible location: just below the 11,239-foot summit of Mount Hood, on the northeast side.
A second call was also made from the phone on Monday to 9-1-1, a Clackamas County deputy said Wednesday. The call did not go through.
On Tuesday, the cell phone didn't respond to the pings, which means the phone has a dead battery, has been moved, or has been turned off.
Already struggling against bad weather, searchers are now having to work without the help of the cell phone pings.
The ping concept is used in a number of different technologies that connect two disparate items, such as Internet providers which send packets of information from a provider to a computer.
Cell phone companies require legal approval to share the information with law enforcement officers.
T-Mobile helped searchers in Hawaii track down a woman who was lost in the mountains there last year based on the ping. But many have done such work.
Edge Wireless LLC was reportedly the one to reach out to law officials in the Kim case, to aid with the search.
The chance of a signal making it through rugged terrain such as that James Kim traveled was slim. This is also the case on Mount Hood, where Dobrow says a small movement could take climber James Kelly out of the coverage area.
"I think it is pretty remarkable and encouraging that we were able to get this information in such hard conditions," Dobrow said.
(Copyright 2006 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)