The Bonnaroo festival was held in Manchester, Tennessee this year and around 80,000 people attended the festival. It goes without saying that handling such a large crowd of people puts a toll on first responders. However, Apple’s Crash Detection feature made things even more difficult this year.
Unintentionally triggered Crash Detection
For the uninitiated, the Crash Detection feature works by alerting emergency responders whenever the device detects a sudden motion in the device. The feature uses an array of sensors including a barometer, accelerometer, and gyroscope to assess the crash and initiate a call to first responders upon detecting a crash. As reported by local news publication WKRN, this year’s festival saw five times more false 911 calls than average as per Director of Coffee County 911 Communication Center Scott LeDuc. Luckily, false calls did not cause many issues for the responders in handling real emergency calls. “Our employees really stepped up, as first responders always do really step up in the line of duty and they did. And we didn’t have any situation where we couldn’t help someone because of the amount of calls,” said LeDuc. The false calls can be attributed to the sudden movements of owners when they danced at the music festival. Authorities even sent out alerts to the attendees to turn off the Crash Detection feature on their devices before participating in the festival to minimize false 911 calls. “It reduced the amount of calls that we were getting. It probably reduced it 40 to 60 percent,” added LeDuc. Most importantly, Apple offered to travel to Coffee County to help the officials. However, most of the false 911 calls were verified over the phone by county officials. To ensure the genuinity of calls, Coffee County along with Bonnaroo talked to callers. They made sure whether the call was initiated due to a falsely triggered Crash Detection feature or if there was a real emergency. With the upcoming Ally 400 NASCAR race in the neighboring Nashville next week, Coffee County has worked with Wilson County to ensure that such cases of false 911 calls are managed diligently by first responders.
