911 call centers in Colorado's high country receive false text alerts from iPhones using satellites

CBS News

2 days ago

Friday afternoons can get relatively busy in Grand County as the weekend crowds roll in. A message came into the dispatch center last Friday via a relatively new method. A text message conveyed via satellite from an iPhone.
Someone was trapped by fire in the area around Meadow Creek Reservoir near Tabernash. In Grand County, which has been hit hard by wildfire at times, an alert like that generates a serious response.
"It triggered a pretty healthy response," said Grand County Sheriff Brett Shroetlin. "Sheriff's office, emergency medical services, fire department, search and rescue, along with the Forest Service."
On their screens, 911 operators get useful information. The phone number, the GPS coordinates, the approximate range of where that phone is in comparison to that, and even battery strength.
Call takers tried to reach back out to the phone. But they received no response.
"That causes a lot of commotion, causes a lot of our responders to be pulled from the more populous areas of the county and to the remote areas of the county. But we got to respond. We've got to respond until we know it's otherwise," said Shroetlin.
Ultimately, first responders found nothing out of the ordinary in the area where the call came from. No fire. No apparent danger.
It was a false alarm.
Emergency responders in the High Country have received a half dozen or so similar false alarm text alerts. In Boulder County, emergency responders were recently called to the Kelly Dahl Campground near Nederland for a similar issue.
Often, the messages say there's fire. Sometimes a lost person.
Had that been the call, Sheriff Shroetlin says he could not so easily have concluded there was no danger. A lost person might mean the initiation of a long search.
The phone's owner was unaware.
"She was still on the trail system somewhere. We didn't locate her that day, but I was able to finally connect with her on the phone. This happened on Friday, and I talked to her on Monday," said Shroetlin. The woman said she had not purposely sent any emergency message. The sheriff said she told him her hiking companion's phone was acting weird and the battery died prematurely. Then, he related, "She said she tried to take a picture with hers, and then her phone died as well. even though she had significant battery strength."
The feature allowing access to satellites to send emergency messages was added to iPhones from model 14 forward using IOS 18 or newer, going online last year.
Shroetlin talked with an Apple representative this week, who asked a lot of questions about what the phone's user may have been doing with the phone at the time. A message sent by CBS Colorado to an email address at Apple for comment Wednesday was not returned.
Word is now spreading among High Country search and rescue groups and law enforcement about the potential of false messaging.
It isn't the first time iPhone emergency notifications have caused difficulties with false alarms. In 2022, cell network-based automatic notifications of crash alerts were being triggered at ski areas in Colorado when skiers went down or made sudden stops.
Shroetlin likes the idea of phones connecting to satellites to send emergency messages.
"The idea is fantastic up here, where we don't have any good cellular service, especially in the far back country." But right now there's a sense of wariness developing about the messages.
"When I pull all these resources up to a remote area of the county that that leaves the other areas a lot of times uncovered or certainly under-covered," he said. "We have that connectivity issue up here already. This just adds complexity to it."