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.'"

Comments

GPS equipment in phones would be useful here

[smoondog]

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

Re:GPS equipment in phones would be useful here

[Russ Steffen]

Actually, it would be nearly useless in this case. GPS signals are very, very weak and can blocked by as little as a sheet of aluminum foil or a few millimeters of water. A GPS receiver under all those tons of concrete and steel would never be able to aquire and track.

Re:GPS equipment in phones would be useful here

[NMerriam]

No, GPS doesn't work without line-of-sight to the satellites (and you have to have 3-4 satellites at a minimum, which is tricky even outdoors in a place like Manhattan).

But having the cell triangulation that is (i think) being mandated for general emergency services use would be useful in this situation. it proovides effectively the same results but only works in a cellular-enabled area...

Re:GPS equipment in phones would be useful here

[Russ Steffen]

Except in this case the location cached before the collision would be something like "1 World Trade Center, NE corner, floor 45 through 55". (GPS's vertical accuracy is much worse than it's horizontal accuracy.) Now add the fact that the nearest cell tower was on the roof, and it went offline immediately after the collision. Now add the fact that floors 45 through 55 are now laying in a pile with the other 100 floors. That cached position will likely be hundreds of feet from where the phone ended up - and that's assuming the person and phone ended up in the same place.

I'm not saying that GPS in cells phones is or isn't a good idea. All I'm saying is that it wouldn't be likely to have helped locate anyone in this case. The only way to find and rescue the people with those cell phones is to trianglate the signals from the phones.

Re:GPS equipment in phones would be useful here

[crazy_swimmer]

Dude, I wish it weren't so for the sake of those trapped, but the GPS signal really is very weak, and could never make it through that pile of rubble. I just went backpacking on Labor Day weekend, and my friend had a GPS locator device. Even in a remote area north of Yosemite National Park in California (an area with nothing man-made to provide interference, and roughly 9000 feet higher elevation than the WTC), we still had a hard time getting a signal. Yes, the batteries were in and fully charged. The fact of the matter is, the sparse trees and even our own bodies were blocking the signal in some cases.

batteries are dead by now

[bjtuna]

by now, any of those ppls' cell phone batteries have long since worn out.

Re:batteries are dead by now

[IvyMike]

While you're almost certainly correct about phones, my two-way pager's battery lasts for at least a month, so there's at least that.

Cellphone batteries running out?

[zulux]

After so many hours, woulden't most cell phone batteries have run out by now. I hope I'm wrong.

Re:Cellphone batteries running out?

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

It seems to me that there are two ways for cell phone signals to be useful so long after these phones' last charge :

Someone with a very big clue realizes cell phone signals will be useful when rescue operations take place and convinces all the cell phone companies to shut down all the cell towers around the area of the disaster. That way, cell phones don't get any signal anymore and stop "talking" to the towers, therefore conserving battery energy. Afterward, during the rescue operations (now), cell towers are switched back on for a few minutes every 2 hours or so, and rescuers take advantage of these few minutes to scan the area for cell phone responses.

Buried victims who are still alive *and* still able to reach their cell phones *and* still able to think clearly enough realize that their cell phones may be useful to their future rescue, switch them off, then turn them on only a few minutes per day, to make a call, or hoping that someone will pick up their phones' signals.

These are the only two possibilities I can think of that would keep cell phones alive and somewhat usable so long after the tragedy. Sadly, I don't think either possibility is even remotely likely. Of course, I wish with all my heart that I'm wrong, and also that battery technology and power management are now advanced enough that lifes can be saved as a result.

Re:Cellphone batteries running out?

[Gordonjcp]

Well, the microwave oven certainly does shield users from the microwave emissions. But it's not terribly effective outside a certain frequency range.

The actual cooking area is tuned to the microwave frequency in use - around 2.45GHz. If you operate a microwave with the door open, it won't do you a lot of good, but the radiation *away from the direct "beam" of microwaves* is incredibly weak.

Now, mobile phones (UK GSM, but others are similar) tend to work around 900MHz for low band, and 1800MHz for high band. It's not really near the resonant frequency of the cooking chamber, so doesn't get absorbed (can you say "Helmholz bottle"?)

Finally, this is also why mobile phone cell towers are *not* dangerous - a microwave oven uses a very specific frequency, at very high power, from a distance of *inches* to cook food. A cell tower uses a lower frequency, with very low power (often as little as 10w), from much further away...

Re:Are they alive?

[spudnic]

I heard reports that there where several subteranian areas that have pockets that are open. This was followed up by saying that there where a lot of snack shops and the such that would have been stocked with food and drinks.

If someone was lucky enough to find themselves in this situation they could survive for quite awhile.

Call Center

[ghasty]

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...

Re:Are they alive?

[Rackemup]

They're trying to clear the subway tunnel under the building to see if anyone actually on the platform under the towers survived. The problem is that water mains have burst, flooding the tunnels and filling them with debris. At present I think they're a third of the way there.

To clarify on "being used to find survivors"

[SMN]

After seeing this on CNN and reading an article linked to by Drudge, it would appear that the purpose of this isn't what it might appear to be at first. Some quick posters appear to think that it's being used to locate survivors within the rubble. As one poster pointed out, it simply isn't precise enought to pinpoint where in the debris the phone is, and it's particularly inaccurate at finding out how deep the phone is buried (ie, how "high" it is).

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.

Re:Well...

[ergo98]

But if it means even the slightest chance of preventing this kind of thing from happening again, I'd sacrifice some anonymity any day.

It is incredibly tragic that people are rewriting the bounds of freedoms at a moment of emotional upset (sort of like going grocery shopping when you're hungry): i.e. Western society has done just fine for quite a long time building the best society on the planet, and in a heartbeat people are willing to take it all away because of a single incident (BTW: Seems to me that we could just intrude in that freedom of religion worldwide and suddenly these problems wouldn't exist...you're willing to give that up right?). The reality is that government backdoors in encryption, and tracking for cellphones works to catch one single type of person: Idiots. If I were a criminal I would dream of a cell phone that sent the location (picked up by GPS...triangulation would be tougher but of course with simple relays you could get around that no problem as well. Maybe stick the cell retransmitter on top of a public bus and use it as a relay, ad nauseum) as I'd reverse engineer it to give a location several miles off: Keep the law busy for a while, and as we know law enforcement and intelligence has been FAR too much in love with technology as of late, so you can bet they would sit looking at their screen saying "Damnit he's got to be here! The screen says so! Look again!". It's hilarious that instead of intelligence or physical protective measures (such as secured doors on planes which are so dumbshit obvious that it boggles the mind) people look at the IDIOTIC (I mean mentally deficient. Seriously this gets me in a rage that people and their quest for the illusion of safety can be so god damn stupid) measures such as "Ban MS Flight Simulator!" or "Don't allow Arab men to buy one way tickets!", or "Let carnivore listen to all emails for secret words that'll give away the terrorists!". The illusion of safety, and then everyone can go back to their lives pretending that everything is hunky dory and they're just fine and have nothing to worry about because damnit the government has carnivore, backdoors in encryption that only law abiding people use (oh, also which organized crime uses to get at your information too while you're illusioned into thinking it's secure), and the right to cavity search any random Joe on demand....until the next attack occurs. Then you just have to reduce freedoms more right?

Noise triangulation...

[zulux]

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.

Re:Noise triangulation...

[aozilla]

Triangulation works in three dimensions. Two spheres intersect in a circle, three spheres (a circle and a sphere) intersect at two points. One of the two points is generally an impossible answer (too high, for instance). This is how GPS works, with three satellites (although it is more accurate with four).