A hiker says he was able to help save his aunt’s life because he had the what3words app on his phone.
Ed Farnworth was hiking in Switzerland and his 59-year-old Aunt Sarah when she fell 60-feet down a mountain and suffered serious injuries.
The two were in the woods, far away from flat ground, and there were no landmarks for Ed to tell the emergency services where they were.
Luckily, he remembered he had the what3words app on his phone which provides users with a unique three-word code that reveals their precise location.
The emergency personnel knew all about what3words—and the address ///crabmeat.hers.froze showed them the exact spot where Sarah landed.
The 31-year-old hiker from Manchester, England, regularly visits his auntie who now lives in Switzerland and hikes often. They had both researched the trail beforehand.
“The weather was great and we were having an amazing day,” recalled Ed. “I was leading the way in front of her on our decent down the mountain when I turned around and saw she had started to lose her balance.
“She was very close to the edge and started to fall, she had a backpack on, so her balance was all out of sync.
“She tumbled over the edge and from then on, she didn’t stop tumbling down. She was hysterical, shouting my name and shouting help.
Ed saw Sarah hitting her head on a tree extremely hard. “It was a dense whack and then she stopped making any noise.
“I lost sight of her as I tried to make my way down to her, I’d never dealt with anything like this before. I found her on her front unconscious, I thought that she was dead at this point.
“She had a huge cut in her forehead, an open wound and her face was purple already. Her arm was badly broken, and she was covered in blood.”
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Ed knew he had to remain calm and call for help, but panicked that he had no idea where they were—until he remembered the what3words app.
“I had downloaded what3words a few years ago, I remember downloading it because I go on all these hiking trips, I had genuinely forgotten about it.
Looking back, Ed says the free app saved Sarah’s life as It only took 25 minutes for the helicopter to find the pair.
While waiting, Sarah was revived and started saying she was cold.
“She was visibly concussed, she didn’t know who I was to start with, and she was asking me the same question over and over.
“She was crying out for her husband and daughter, and she still can’t remember a thing from what happened.”
Without the app, Ed would have had to potentially leave to find help or shout for help, both of which could have made my Sarah even more distressed.
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“It sped the whole process up and stopped any further injuries occurring, I am super super grateful that I had that app.”
Sarah suffered a broken arm, gashed forehead, and was severely concussed in the fall. Her face was completely misshapen and she remained in hospital for over a week, finally going home in a neck brace, with a metal plate in her arm.
Sarah still remains passionate about hiking, and Ed wants to make sure every hiker is aware of how important it is to download What3words, which divides the world into 10ft squares—each one named by a unique combination of three words.
“People having the app is reassuring to me,” said Ed. “I’m taking a group of people from work hiking tomorrow and I’ll make sure they all have what3words.”
The app addresses are accepted by over 4,800 dispatchers who answer 911 calls in the US. Emergency services in the UK are recommending the free app, because “it saves lives.”
What3words is also integrated into the navigation systems of many Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Land Rover, Subaru and Mitsubishi vehicles in the US, making it easy for drivers to enter the 3-word addresses straight into their car’s navigation system.
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Sarah Robert still has no recollection of the fall itself, but is thankful for the outcome.
“What3words helped speed up the whole process for which I am extremely grateful. Without it, I don’t see how I would have got the help I needed and things may have ended much worse.
“I had never heard of or used the app before my nephew explained it to me, but I’m so thankful he did.”
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