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FEMA To Use Cell Phone Signals To Find Survivors
twistah writes: "CNN had an interview with a representative of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), the agency helping with the New York WTC rescue effort, who said that Lucent has given them technology to trace the signal of cell phones. The idea is that people will give them phone numbers of cell phones and pagers of people missing due to the WTC collapse, which FEMA will call and attempt to trace the signal to find the missing people. FEMA has now put this information on their web site, and are dubbing it the 'Wireless Emergency Response Team.'"
Can people live this long under rubble? Or are they just finding bodies like this?
My other car is first.
I work as a co-op for the Mitre Corporation [www.mitre.org] and last week it was announced on a company email list that about a dozen MITREites are down in NYC helping find people with this cell phone technology. Details have been a little sketchy as to precisely what was being used and such, so it's nice to get that information. I'm really proud to be part of a company doing what we can to help.
09
I was thinking about this the other day, but if people were frantically calling these cellphones then the battery would almost certainly be dead by now, and even if this were not the case my phone will only last about 4 days without getting charged as it would ramp up the power output to try and get a signal.
Hopefully this will be a good launching point for this technology in the future
For safety reasons cell phones are going to have GPS receivers in them soon to tell 911 operators where you are when calling on your cell phone. This would be totally useful here, because there are going to be a lot more cell phones in that pile of rubble than living people. While I agree with the privacy concerns (including my own) this would have been totally helpful here. (Especially since most cellphones don't have more than 3-5 days of battery life. They should all be running down by now).
-Sean
by now, any of those ppls' cell phone batteries have long since worn out.
Intercarve Networks, LLC
there is a blurb at techienews here about E911 with a link to an article about when phone companies were supposed to have it.
After so many hours, woulden't most cell phone batteries have run out by now. I hope I'm wrong.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
And what about a link to the CNN interview? Or isn't it on the web? J.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earthbound misfit, I.
http://www.markvd.net/
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine...
According to news reports earlier in the week, there were indeed quite a few cell phone calls from those people trapped under the rubble. But right now after 4 days, those people would have died due to injuries and lack of water and food. I just wonder, if they have this kind of technology, why didn't they use it earlier?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I read a number of news reports earlier in the week. I think /. is just a bit slow on this one.
:)
-Sean
One would hope that those trapped would have realized rescue efforts were going to take several days or more and powered down their cell phones in order to conserve the battery.
But I suppose that is speculative, at best.
Goals are deceptive - the unaimed arrow never misses.
Its been a few days already. How are they going to find signals from phones whose batteries are almost dead, through rock and other signal blockers?
Most peoples' phones work fine for a couple of days, but unless everyone down there has an extra battery pack or a working charger and plug, their cel phones won't do them much good at all.
"Look at me, I invented the stove!" -- Ben Franklin
The company I work for is doing the same thing. They haven't done it already because it's never been done before. With CDMA phones it's not as simple as looking for a specific frequency, they have to identify the phone by the code it uses to decode the signal.
People I work with have been working very hard to modify the basestation software to allow them to search for a particular phone. They are basically strapping a small base station to their back and walking around the rubble.
It's the usual argument. Which would you rather have - anonymity, or the ability to at least *try* and stop things like the WTC crash from happening?
I know it seems ridiculous to you Americans, and I'll probably get flamed to oblivion (though that is not the intention.) But if it means even the slightest chance of preventing this kind of thing from happening again, I'd sacrifice some anonymity any day.
A working cellphone transmits regularly; how about
a field meter with a directional antenna?
I remember an article on Slashdot quite a long time ago that there was some technology being developed for military use that would detect the electric signals emmitted by a human heart's natural pacemaker. The military application would be to allow soldiers to see targets and members of their own force, even when distinguishing a target using infared or night vision would be difficult.
Maybe someone has a link to this story? Or more details about the technology? It sounds like it would be useful in a situation like this.
I also heard on CNN that they can use this "technology" with Palm Pilots as well, but they were very sketchy on the details.
------
www.moneybythenumbers.com
This is an attitude that can only come from someone who has studied very little history, and/or is too young to remember government abuses in the past.
The problem is that if you don't restrict and control the tools that governments have available to them, they will abuse them. It's human nature - if you were an FBI agent, wouldn't you use whatever tools you had at your disposal to track down bad guys? It's not far from there to doing what Sen. Joseph McCarthy was doing in the 1950s: tracking down people engaging in "un-American activities", the kind of term which of course is defined by whatever over-zealous government official is conducting such investigations.
There are countless cases of over-zealousness of prosecutors, police, and other officials, and to an extent, that's the way we want it - but that's exactly why there are laws and structures to keep these people in check, and to make sure they don't harrass people who are considered by law to be "innocent until proven guilty".
It might seem to make sense to give the government more leeway in this time of crisis, but even if it does make sense, any extra powers granted to them should be temporary, and only usable in pursuing terrorist activity. Otherwise, the terrorists will win in a much bigger way than they have already: they'll succeed in making the United States a place where the government abridges its citizens' freedoms, a place where many citizens may end up with good reasons to fear their government.
I'm a Spanish Telecommunications Engineer.
I know of cell-phone technologies. And I think it's not difficult to locate a cell-phone if you the base-station can receive signal from it.
For those who don't know how this works, here is a brief explanation: I have a cell-phone ("mobile terminal", MT) and I'm sending signal to a base-station (BS), and the BS says to my MT how much power it has to use and how long before its time slot has to send the signal. Knowing the power and the time, it's easy to locate a cell-phone using at least data from three base-stations (yes, you have to use triangulation).
I think it's not that difficult. In fact, it's easy and the police uses this approach to locate people. Israel even uses this way to kill terrorists (or potential terrorists).
--
Pau Garcia i Quiles
Enginyer Tècnic de Telecomunicacions, esp. Telemàtica
Download the Linux Kernel 2.4.0 Poster now! (PDF)
I've actually been at the Wireless Emergency Response call center most of the morning and am scheduled to go back 3am Monday. Yes, it may not be a good chance...but it's still a chance. You can still hear the horror in people's voices. Being in Georgia we've been so removed from the victums and family...being at the call center really brings it home...
I do hate to say this, but a travisty of this magnitute will have some positive outcomes. Weither it be search and resuce tech and procedure, building arcitecture, or just plain people looking over their shoulder, this was necessacary for humanity to experience even though it blows. Look at the Titanic. Because of that, regulations were created to make sea travel safe.
= They say "guns don't kill people, people kill people", but I think the gun helps. -Eddie Izzard =
I was just in that basement area this past Sunday. It is the connection between the Church St. Subway Station and the PATH train to NJ and is better described as a nice train station rather than as a basement. There are several restaurants, a Borders Book Store, and various other things. It's like a small stretch of a shopping mall. I heard on the news that they are considering using the PATH tunnels to try to get people. In other news, though, my cell phone has never had any service down there.
Last night I dug up this passage from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and typed it in:
The Earth.
Visions of it swam sickeningly through his nauseated mind. There was no way his imagination could feel the impact of the whole Earth having gone, it was too big. He prodded his feelings by thinking that his parents and his sister had gone. No reaction. He thought of all the people he had been close to. No reaction. Then he thought of a complete stranger he had been standing behind in the queue at the supermarket two days before and felt a sudden stab--the supermarket was gone, everything in it was gone. Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustraphobia closed in on him.
England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, has gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York was gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk forever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonald's, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.
He passed out. When he came round a second later he found he was sobbing for his mother.
Of course, Dent's thoughts were of complete and utter physical destruction of the entire planet. However, the comparison is not totally unjustified since many of us feel that the entire culture of the world has changed in an irreversable way. In a sense, the old Earth is gone.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/09/14/afgha nistan/index.html.
here's the lead:
An Afghan-American speaks
You can't bomb us back into the Stone Age. We're already there. But you can start a new world war, and that's exactly what Osama bin Laden wants.
By Tamim Ansary
A receiver would only tell the cell phone carrier where they were, it wouldn't tell the person on the other end of the line where they were.
With the current situation this would do no good. The survivors already know they are under a pile of rubble. GPS won't shed any new light for them.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
There are multiple ways to locate a cell phone or pager, and I suspect they will use all of them. Some have already mentioned GPS, that's rare to non-existant in today's devices. More likely are triangulation, or simple signal strength.
Several cell providers have been using triangulation to work towards the E911 requirements. Rather than implement expensive GPS solutions, they simply track a phone from multiple antennas, and triangulate the location of the phone from that. While normal accuracy is only +- a quarter mile, in an instance like this local portable cells could bet set up around the site and generate high accuracy.
Even if that can't be done, making a cell phone talk to the cell site (telling it to reregister, for instance) would allow you to listen for its signal with a strength meter. Walk away it reduces, walk towards it gets stronger. In a relatively small area like this it would work well.
Of course, there is also low tech. If they ring the phones, and make the area quiet, they can hear them ring. For those very near the surface this could be particularly effective.
Others have commented on batteries. Many cell phones are probably running low, but I would venture about 1/3 of today's phones last a week on standby, and would still be able to ring. Two way pagers and other communications devices often last longer, two weeks or more at a go. They could still have a huge number of these devices active. That said, they need to be careful. Ringing them too much will run out batteries.
I wish them luck, it's a good idea.
Instead, they're only trying to get a very general location of the phones, to determine whether they're at "Ground Zero" or not. If not, they could potentially be used to find if somebody's at a hospital in a coma, or if they somehow got out of NYC in time and for some reason haven't been able to contact someone.
These phones aren't really being used to locate the survivors, they're being used to gain some clue as to whether a person is buried, or might have survived. It won't do a great job of locating people, but it will help discriminate if a person is "likely dead" or "might have gotten away."
I also heard that no actual calls have to be made to trace a phone's location, but I'd guess that it must at least be turned on and able to receive a call. And yes, as many posters have said, batteries are going to be a problem this many days later. But any more information on what happened to these people will surely be welcomed by their families.
-- Imagine how much more advanced our technology would be if we had eight fingers per hand.
OK.. I REALLY hope this works... but something tells me that the odds are VERY low :(
- It has been about 4 days since these phones have been charged. If someone alive is unconscious they probably didn't try to conserve battery life. Hence the phone doesn't have power. About 50% of modern phones can last over 4 days (mine can last a week) so there is still some hope here.
- If (hopefully) its owner *is* alive, he/she probably tried to dial out (and obviously failed because they would have been rescued). If they were smart they would try to turn off the phone to conserve battery life. When the rescuers try to dial the number it would go right to voice mail.
I hope I am wrong...
Kevin
Not a bad idea, although as others have said, a lot of batteries are dead by now.
I heard on the news that some body-sniffing dogs are now being employed with success. At this point, this may be a better lower tech solution.
Something of a morbid subject, still...
What about cooperating with the other Arab states?
We kill the Taliban then you guys split up the country or administer it or whatever you want. The US is happy because OBL is gone. These other Arab states would presumably be happy for the chance to improve the lives of their fellow Arabs.
And Pakistan has already agreed to let us through. Really, does the author think they are the only person who knows anything?
Know someone who is stealing cable? Report them!
Did anyone even stop for a *MOMENT* to think? Today is Saturday
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Yep, same here. I have a Qualcomm 2100. WOuld've gotten a Nokia but you can't with sprint PCS. Oh well.
I have placed images of outside the US Embassy in Ottawa, Ontario in Canada. Canadians have been placing various momentos, and memorial offerings along the outer fence. Feel free to repost this URL wherever appropriate...
http://207.198.90.123/Memorial/index.html
-kilk
narrowly, as far as i know (from watching bbc streams), pakistan has agreed only to the terms of a u.n. security council resolution. although i don't know what this says it is unlikely to be a complete rubber stamp of u.s. wishes. thus overflies and/or use of pakistan air basese are probably allowed. launching a ground invasion, like desert storm is probably not, (yet).
but i think the more general point of the piece -- that obl wants to provoke massive retaliation as a prequel to more moves on his part -- is worth considering.
taking into account the highly complex and sophisticated nature of the plot so far -- one that has been years in the planning, apparently -- it would be foolish to not at least entertain the notion that provoking retaliation isn't part of the wider game plan.
If you could get a cell phone to answer a special emergency incomming call, and if you could place a cell tower close to the site - you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise. This would allow rescue workers to fin the locations of the phone - even if the GPS signal can't get to the phone, the noise could.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Dude, neither Afghanistan, nor any of the surrounding states have any significant Arab population at all.
You really should learn something about the world before you start mouthing off about how best to rule and slaughter it.
Thank you for that link.
Ansary's little essay rings with more truth than can be found in a ton of the knee-jerk verbiage flowing out of the media.
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
I think what needs to happen when we go after Osama Bin Laden is we need to fill a bunch of bombers up with wreckage from the World Trade Center and drop it on his ass.
Bin Laden tried once before to bomb the WTC. He obviously is very intested it seeing the World Trade Center up close. We should oblige him.
After all, we dropped Saddam's limo on Bagdad.
Dude, neither Afghanistan, nor any of the surrounding states have any significant Arab population at all.
Arabia is just the peninsula and not the surrounding area. You got me "dude". That's one point for you. Congratulations.
Your correction however is irrelevant. Let me help you stay focused on the following fact. The US is going to retaliate and people are going to die. This particular thread is about what can be done to limit the destruction by removing the incentive for the survivors to grow up to become terrorists. What I suggest is rebuilding the country or countries that will be destroyed. This seems to have worked well for Germany and Japan. It may not work well in the Middle East because there is so much resentment of the US there. What I suggest is turning over reconstruction to the Arab states - Saudi Arabia for example.
Somehow I doubt you'll have anything intelligent to add but I invite you to surprise me.
Hmm, well glad to hear it. I worked for 'em for 10 weeks. They were completely unethical bastards. Hired me for a 5 month contract, which turned out to be really 4 months, then pressured me to go on full-time at half my consulting rate. When I didn't take the deal they fired me, then used my 10 weeks of work to fulfill 1 yr contract with the NSA.
Nice, real nice.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
No, they were in a position to do that if it had gotten any farther but it went down instead. The passengers found out about the WTC via cell-hone and apparently decided that if they were going to die they'd go out on their own terms.
The revolution will NOT be televised.
This is an incredible story about some of the amazing new military technology we've got.
We'll need it, too, if this guy is right. It's a well-written essay.
--
Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
According to CNN/Yahoo, Colin Powell basically got them to agree to cooperate with any "reply" to terrorist efforts...in other words, roll your tanks and fly your planes over the country.
> for the love of God, change your .sig
As good as done sir. It's not quite appropriate as it was. (It came from a newspaper article about a house lit on fire by a sparkler)
My other car is first.
Two factors affect phone battery life that I haven't seen mentioned here yet, so I'll inject them here. (I used to have a job selling Sprint and AT&T cell phones, so I learned more of this than normal people want to know.)
1) Part of it is just the age of your phone. Newer phones have more efficient power saving systems. No great surprise there.
2) Many newer phones (and virtually all the cheap ones that some phone companies give to new customers) only use digital cell networks. Phones using all-digital networks need less power than analog cell phones. Given the same amount of stored energy in a battery, the digital phone often lasts twice as long as the analog one.
It sounds like zulux has a dual-mode phone (as do I). When a dual-mode phone loses its connection to the digital cell towers (which are still rather rare outside cities), it switches to analog (and drains its battery faster). If it can't get a good signal at all, it then switches to power-save mode. Dual-mode phones thus have wider coverage areas than all digital phones, at the cost of a shorter battery life outside urban areas.
(Incidentally, many dual-mode phones allow the user to deactivate mode switching, so it's all or nothing. This is useful in those freak zones where you're too close to an analog tower, and the phones switches modes when it doesn't need to.)
Summing up my rambling:
1) Analog phones (which are fairly rare nowadays) buried in the WTC rubble are almost certainly out of juice. Two or three days is about it for analog phones.
2) Digital and dual-mode phones might still have juice, depending on the obvious variables like battery capacity, power-saving technology, and whether the phones are wasting juice trying to connect to the analog network.
3) It's always a good idea to keep your phone batteries fully charged, and it's OK to splurge and buy the extra long-life batteries, if that's an option for your phone.
This has been a public service annoucement from your friendly neighborhood ex-phone salesman.
Proud to be / Smiley-free / Since Nineteen / Ninety-Three
but i'd just like to say - in this week of praying, candle burning, and flag waving - if you'd really like to "do something", here are a few suggestions:
1. buy or check out a book on the middle east, american foreign policy, islam, terrorism, the history of afghanistan/arabic nations, or other relevant topics. intelligence and rational thinking will be our greatest weapons in this new "war".
2. turn off the major networks, and listen to npr or the bbc, use the internet, and read diverse newspapers. stop getting all of your information from the "gatekeepers". realize that all media could have potential biases and hidden agendas, so get information from as many different sources as possible.
3. think for yourself; really think, don't just react. use logic, but never forget how you felt on 9/11.
4. pay attention to what your government is doing. this is more important than ever. it's shocking, but true: at this moment our government is attempting use these attacks to push through highly questionable legislation. capital gains taxes and carnivore should not be discussed on the heels of this crises, while emotions are running high. no matter your opinion, force your congressmen to cool their jets before making any more major decisions.
5. have dinner table discussions with your friends and family. talk with arab-americans about their experiences. talk about real issues, not just lurid details and rumours. keep an open mind. encourage those around you to think rationally.
america must become the nation we are supposed to be: a just nation founded on independent spirit and free thought, not fear, hatred and ignorance. i refuse to say that ignorance on the part of americans is responsible for this attack, but it is to blame for the hostile attitude of foreign citizens (still, notice how the news has connsistently shown the same scant footage of celebration, with just a few people participating in each case). arrogance and ignorance are to blame for our failure to prevent this attack, and we can no longer think of ourselves as isolated or invincible.
Granted, battery life on cell phones and pagers is an issue, but...
:(
Don't these devices also use a crystal-based signal from which to run? Those little quartz devices are not immune to shock, by any means. I'd even hazard to guess that falling a hundred stories, let alone having a hundred stories' worth os rubble fall on them, is very likely to render the crystals inoperative.
Still, some units may have remained functional. Here's hoping they find some people with this approach, tho I suspect that even a well-designed unit would have been pounded unto dust with the collapse
Lemon curry?
By the time enough red tape had been cut through to get permission or instructions to the fighters to actually shoot down a civilian airliner it would probably have been too late even if the fighters had already been circling the towers and the Pentagon.
I'd like to hear if anything more came of reports mentioned once or twice late Tuesday/early Wednesday that some witnesses reported a smaller plane following the one that hit the Pentagon.
Perhaps someone who knows more about airplanes than do I could offer an opinion as to whether a fight over the controls of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania or some deliberate sabotage by the airline's pilot or other aircrew member could have resulted in damage of some sort to the wing that would have sent it plummeting to the ground without any need for outside intervention?
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
...who reflexively twitched at the naming of FEMA?
Too much Deus Ex, I guess...
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
Who is to say that survivors had their cellphones on them? If a building in which you were residing got hit by a plane and started to burn, would you want to get out first and buy a new cellphone later, or waste time finding your existing phone?
Perhaps all this would achieve, even if it was accurate enough, would be to find a whole load of lost phones amongst the rubble. Potentially, this could also confuse the situation as some of the owners may have escaped safely.
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please sign. Slashdotters are a large majority that could help something like this. HREF="http://www.actionagenda.com/petitions/
- "Likewise also as it was in the days of Lot; they did eat, they drank, they bought, they sold, they planted, they builded; But the same day that Lot went out of Sodom it rained fire and brimstone from heaven, and destroyed them all. Even thus shall it be in the day when the Son of man is revealed. In that day, he which shall be upon the housetop, and his stuff in the house, let him not come down to take it away: and he that is in the field, let him likewise not return back. Remember Lot's wife." Luke 17:28-32.
Of course, the religious trot out these old stories whenever something horrible happens and point out that it is the end of days etc, etc, bla, bla, bla.If there's a god then I don't want to know him, cause he's a jerk.
:wq
It would seem to me that one of those infrared cameras would be perfect here. Although they can pick up heat through walls, I don't know how they would do with the massive amounts of concrete and steel that must be at the site.
Can anyone think of a reason why an infrared camera wouldn't work?
I waver back and forth between there being absolutely no chance for those caught underground, and this scenario where they're living in a pocket of an underground city. The reality, I fear, is that the amount of debris, as well as ruptured gas and water mains would have made that part of the building pretty well uninhabitable.
:wq
If anybody found it offensive I offer my deepest, sincerest apologies.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Shouldn't battery life of a cell phone be a concern here? Even the best ones have lives of only a few days in non-talk mode. By the time this story hit, it had already been 5 days, so the chances of success seem somewhat low. This is still a good idea, regardless.
As I flipped across C-SPAN 2 the other night (yes, there actually was *ONE* channel not showing the same thing over and over), Senator Leahy (D-Vermont) was questioning an amendment to S.149, an appropriations bill, that he thought would greatly relax the requirements for getting a 'wiretap' order.
I'm pretty sure this appropriations bill sought money for the immediate crisis, even though it was reported out of committee back in July.
Leahy kept harping on the provision that any 'law enforcement or other authority' simply needed to certify to a judge that the monitoring was necessary. Of course, that old windbag Orrin Hatch took great umbrage at this questioning of the amendment in this time of dire straits, and how dare Leahy suggest that this might be overreaching by the government! Leahy wasn't particularly clear and Hatch made it sound like there was nothing in the amendment that didn't already exist in current law; but, then why would they need an amendment if there were no difference?
It all sounded like an opportunistic attempt (that passed) to seek an expansion of government wiretapping abilities.
This debate was either Friday or maybe Thursday evening and the amendment passed.
Beware.
slashdot: A failed experiment.
Do you have a source for this? I haven't seen it reported... FBI had reported that it knew the planes had been hijacked, but "since these sorts of events normally end peacefully" it hadn't taken any action.
Probably the fighters had been sent up to investigate after air traffic controllers had figured out that something was wrong, but at that point the real purpose of the hijackings probably wasn't known or suspected.
Probably not suspected... flights had been off course and not hailing for 30 minutes, so were assumed hijacked, but it's hard to believe anything was responding. An in-flight F-16 would probably be cruising at 5-600mph, and could reach 1400mph within 15-20 seconds, meaning that "70 miles away" would have been 3 1/2 minutes away. At that distance, air-to-air missles would have been possible, and after the first tower had been hit, there would have been some discussion of this option. Recent reports from Cheney indicate that it wasn't discussed until after the Pentagon was hit.
However, there were nearly 16 minutes between the WTC impacts. It is plausible that an already airborne military craft would have made it to the vicinity in time for the second attact, but nothing off the ground would have been able to get there... it takes 10-15 minutes to scramble a plane up from strip alert, and we didn't have any sitting on alert at the time...
an opinion as to whether a fight over the controls of the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania or some deliberate sabotage by the airline's pilot or other aircrew member could have resulted in damage of some sort to the wing that would have sent it plummeting to the ground
Flight 93 hit the ground at over 500mph, indicating that it was under power and, likely, undamaged. While the flight crew was likely to know how to cause enought damage -- even from outside the cabin -- to down the plane, this suggests that there was a stuggle for the cabin. As well, keep in mind that there were calls from the plane -- including Barbara Olson's call to her husband -- within five minutes of the downing. None of these calls to my knowledge reported damage to the craft.
If you could get a cell phone to answer a special emergency incomming call,
You can. As part of the process of connecting a call the cell towers send a message to the phone, asking it to tell them where it is ("Joe, can you hear me?"). The phone responds with a short transmission ("I'm Joe and I hear you!"), and the cell towers that hear the response can measure the signal quality and decide which one has the best signal path to the phone. Then THAT one places the call. If none have an adequate signal the call isn't placed, so the phone doesn't ring.
This means your phone can be "pinged" and located without it doing anything to notify you. If you haven't added an external detector (i.e. diode and piezo sounder) to detect the transmission you won't know it's being done.
I understand that law enforcement agencies already have equipment to do this. Perhaps this is what they're bringing.
and if you could place a cell tower close to the site
For "cell tower" read "small box of test equipment with a little antenna at a known point."
- you could do a triangulation of the vicem by setting up three loude noise makers spaced far appart. Each would trigger in sequece, and a triangulation could be made by determining how long the cellphone took to hear the noise.
Simpler: Have four (or more) antennas at known relative positions listen for the signal and measure the DIFFERENCE in the arrival time. (You can also measure the PHASE of the signal to determine the "difference in arrival time" to as much less than a cycle of the signal as you equipment can measure the phase.)
The surface of constant path difference (result of measuring with two antennas) gives you a hyperbolid. Add a third antenna and you get the intersection of two hyperbolids - a curved line. (Don't recall the family of curves at the moment.) Add the fourth and you're down to two points in space.
You can also do this with four passive devices measuring the time between a cell tower's "ping" and the phone's reply, though the computation is a bit more involved.
Problem is that this is the behavior in free space. Add anything that bounces the signal about or shields the direct path and you're fouled up. And the phones are under tons of material, much of which reflects microwaves.
Forget about measuring phase to locate down to inches - you'll have to depend on the arrival time of the start of the signal, before the additional signals that took a different route arrive. Still good for feet or so. But if you're lucky what you'll find is the hole the signal is coming out of - and if you're not you'll get a bogus location in the vicinity of such a hole or perhaps the vicinity of the singal itself, due to signals taking different bank-shots to different antennas.
Still, I expect it would point you in the right direction and usually send you to the right room-sized volume. And as you dig out more obscuring stuff the quality of the location would progressively improve. That's good - as you get closer you need a better idea where you're goiong, to keep from crushing the person you're after.
Also: There's no reason why you couldn't bring test equipment that, once it got a good path to the phone could CALL it, so (if the person was alive and awake) you could talk to them. (Though it might be good to use the call mostly to tell them to stay off the phone but leave it turned on, to conserve the battery.)
Which brings up one last downside: Some people may have either used up their batteries trying to call out while there was no working base station in reacy, or turned off the phone to conserve power for later.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way