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I agree with these points, and yet: "Humberside Police also used the system to find a group of foreign nationals, including a pregnant woman in labour, who wer
by dtf 7y ago
I agree with these points, and yet:
"Humberside Police also used the system to find a group of foreign nationals, including a pregnant woman in labour, who were trapped inside a shipping container at a port.
The port had over 20,000 containers and we knew that we needed to get to them quickly," said the force's control room supervisor Paul Redshaw.
The group were told to download the app and they were soon found.
There is no doubt in my mind that these incidents could have had very different outcomes had we not been able to use what3words," Mr Redshaw said."
The emergency services see something very useful here. Is there a better way to do it? Lat/Lon numbers just don't cut it.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoIf that's an actual story and not PR. What I see: a full-metal enclosure AKA shipping container, and yet a GPS fix is obtained? Pull the other one.
- taneq 7y agoHell, I struggle to even get a cell signal inside one of those things.
- sho 7y agoI have a lot of trouble believing that story.
- dtf 7y agoThe quote is from a serving member of police staff. Should be easy to verify. https://twitter.com/redshaw27 https://twitter.com/redshaw27 There are further cases mentioned in the article from other police forces. - South Yorkshire Police used it to find a 65-year-old man who became trapped after falling down a railway embankment in Sheffield. - North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service found a woman who had crashed her car but was unsure where she was. - Humberside Police were able to quickly resolve a hostage situation after the victim was able to tell officers exactly where she was being held. If these are all completely made up, and have made it past the BBC, then I'm rather surprised. EDIT: I think this must be the incident: https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/11-migrants-found-container-police-2621681 https://www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-new... (The report mentions a substantial search, and in particular commends the actions of good doggo PD Logan: https://twitter.com/HPDogSection/status/1103713458334416896 https://twitter.com/HPDogSection/status/1103713458334416896)
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThese do sound plausible; my issue was with the shipping container aka Faraday cage.
- sho 7y agoAs you say, that article specifically mentions they were found by a police dog! I guess w3w's PR team "forgot" to mention that. Anyway, all these cases highlight the need for a much better way for emergency services to automatically receive GPS coordinates from calls - not for some wannabe rent-seeking proprietary app.
- Piskvorrr 7y agoThis exists. https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-it-works/ https://crisisresponse.google/emergencylocationservice/how-i...
- timthorn 7y agoGrid refs do a good job in the UK. Two letters (which can be omitted if you know roughly where you are) and 6 digits get you to a 100m square, 8 digits to 10m and so on. That's the system the police use as the base truth, and any other system - what3words or Lat/Long - will be converted to OS grid refs with some loss of accuracy due to different projection models. Maps show the grid as an overlay every 1km so the position is easy to read.