Featured Image Credit: San Bernardino County Fire/Facebook
Topics: Technology, Apple, iPhone, US News
Emily Brown
Topics: Technology, Apple, iPhone, US News
Apple's Find My iPhone feature helped rescue workers save a woman who had crashed her car 200 feet below the road.
The phone-locating feature is a saviour for anyone with a habit of losing things, allowing Apple owners to use the app to pinpoint the missing device and even see exactly how far away it is.
Users typically rely on the app to reunite them with their phones, but this week it allowed a family to be reunited with their loved one after she'd crashed her car in Southern California.
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Emergency crews from the San Bernardino County Fire department were called to the scene on Highway 18, north of 40th Street in the city of San Bernardino after the woman's vehicle was found off the side of the road.
Images from the scene showed her car lying on its side at the bottom of the hill, having presumably tumbled down after the driver crashed off the road.
In a post on Facebook, the fire department explained that the woman had likely been in the stranded car all night after setting off from a family gathering the previous evening.
Family members became concerned when they didn't her from her the next morning, so they decided to use Find My iPhone to track her phone and pinpoint her location.
They followed the tracking feature to the highway and called 911 when they spotted her car down the 200-foot drop.
Rescue workers descended down the drop to reach the car and found the woman inside with serious injuries.
The Facebook post described how responders initiated advanced life support interventions while other rescuers set up a rope system which could be used to raise the driver and emergency service workers back to the road level.
Once raised to safety, the driver of the car was taken to an ambulance and transported to a local trauma centre for treatment.
Both the fire department and the family members have been praised for their actions following the crash, with one Facebook user responding to the fire department's post to say: "Thank you 1st responders for getting her out safely.
"Thank you to her FAMILY MEMBERS for due diligence and finding her. Too many times people are not found until it's too late to save their life."
The Find My app can be used to find the current location of devices which are online, and the last known location of devices that have since gone offline.