A ski resort was flooded with emergency notifications from Apple devices  

Terrible waste of resources

The new iPhones and Apple Watch 8 have the ability to detect an accident and automatically notify emergency services. The feature was designed with a car accident in mind, but at a ski resort in the US it caused a lot of trouble after receiving dozens of false emergency alerts.

In more detail, the city’s emergency management center received 71 crash alerts from the iPhones and Apple Watches the skiers were carrying. As it turned out, none of these calls were emergencies and simply came from skiers who were falling down.

No call to 911 can be ignored, and these incidents have cost many resources to the emergency services that had to respond to each incident, at the risk of not being available if a real incident occurs and a life is actually at risk.

These calls require huge resources, from operators to police and ski patrols.

Area operators receive about 20 robocalls a day. They try to call the user back to confirm their condition, but most of the time the skiers have their phones inside their thick clothing and ignore the calls, forcing the services to dispatch rescuers.

Apple has recognized that there is a difficulty in distinguishing between a crash and a skier’s fall, and is working to provide a solution.