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Text message campaign saves Britons
Thirty six stranded British tourists caught up in the tsunami in Sri Lanka were rescued after local telephone companies used technology to pin-point one of their mobile phones, reports the Times Online. "A private initiative involving all phone companies in Sri Lanka began monitoring mobile phones with international roaming and traced the call patterns to figure out the location of the phone users. "There were 10,252 international roaming phones working on Sri Lankan networks at the time of the tragedy," Chris Dharmakirti, who is heading the Tidal Wave Rescue Centre said."We sent everyone an SMS and got responses from 2,321." He said 5,983 roaming phones had gone dead since the disaster while 4,269 phones had been used to make at least one call after the tragedy. "Whenever anyone used the phone, we could track where the person was and restrict our search to affected areas of the country. If a phone is dead it could be that the unit is lost or the person is affected by the tragedy," Mr Dharmakirti said. "But, we are keeping a track on these numbers." He said they sent instructions to the phone users to call a toll-free local number that will be answered by a call centre manned by some 100 people. "Last night we had a response from a British tourist and based on tracking his call we were able to locate a total of 36 stranded Britons," Mr Dharmakirti said."Four of them were critically wounded, but we managed to get to them to safety." -- Links to all Tsunami/cell phone stories posted in Textually.org. |
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