Sometimes Technology CAN Help People …

… when face-to-face or acting in meatspace alone isn’t quite enough.

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Cellphone’s dying ping leads police to woman trapped in SUV for eight days
ROD MICKLEBURGH
September 28, 2007

 
VANCOUVER — It was only a ping from a dead cellphone, but it was enough to secure the miraculous survival of Tanya Rider, after eight days suspended by a seatbelt inside her crumpled Honda SUV at the bottom of a steep ravine.

Although she remains in critical condition in a Seattle hospital, doctors said Friday that Ms. Rider, 33, is on the mend, despite her incredible ordeal of more than a week without food or water.

“I cannot believe that God got her through eight days for her to die in hospital,” said her teary husband Tom, who’d had to weather heavy questioning by police over his wife’s mysterious disappearance.

In fact, Mr. Rider was in the process of taking a lie detector test Thursday afternoon when news came that his wife had been found.

Ms. Rider owes her extraordinary survival to the 21st-century capabilities of the ubiquitous cellphone.

Hers was on when her blue SUV left a deserted stretch of highway southeast of Seattle, plunging seven metres down into a thick tangle of brush and blackberry bushes.

Although the battery eventually died out, a steady ping from the phone had registered at the nearest communications tower. After obtaining the woman’s cellphone records, police managed to identify the tower and guessed she was within an eight-kilometre radius.

Not long afterward, a searcher noticed something amiss in the brush along the road, and there, down a steep slope, was the twisted, mangled wreck with Ms. Rider trapped inside. Pale and hypothermic, but alive.

“I don’t think she would have lasted much longer,” deputy sheriff Rodney Chinnick said. “It’s amazing and near-miraculous that she survived as long as she did.”

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