Cell survivor

Two emergencies last month, both in Oregon, highlight the role a cell phone can play in helping rescuers find someone lost or stranded in difficult terrain. While GPS – global positioning system – devices claim to be the all-purpose savior for people in distress, those tools are also of limited value when someone is stuck or forced to remain isolated, awaiting rescue, survival experts say.

That’s one of the lessons from the effort to find the family of James Kim, 35, of San Francisco, who became lost in a remote section of Oregon after taking a Thanksgiving trip to Seattle and Portland.

With their car stuck on a snowbound logging road, the Kim family had cell phones but no GPS devices. After waiting for nine days, James Kim walked down the road and later became lost. He was found dead of hypothermia.

But rescuers found Kati Kim and the couple’s two daughters alive. They were guided, in part, to the road after an Oregon cell company technician tracked down a brief connection made by one of the family’s phones with a cell tower in that area.

The second event, in early December, involved three climbers stuck on Mt. Hood when bad weather hit.

One climber, 48-year-old Kelly James, of Texas, called relatives with a cell phone from a snow cave. He said two companions, Brian Hall, 37, and Jerry “Nikko” Cooke, 38, were trying to climb down the mountain.

That was the last call James made. About a week later, his body was found in a snow cave. The bodies of Cooke and Hall have not been found.

While a cell phone played a part in saving the Kims, some observers say the Mt. Hood example illustrates the wrong way to use that device as a rescue tool.

“If you understand how a cell phone works, you can use it as a survival tool,” said Ron Howard, president and CEO of Iomax Inc., a North Carolina firm that develops cell-phone tracking technology.

Howard sent a company team to Mt. Hood to search for James’s cell phone, using technology it sells to the U.S. Defense Department.

If the phone still has battery power and is turned on, Iomax claims it can find it to within 40 or 50 meters. Traditional cell companies have tools that can only locate a phone to within 500- to 1,000 yards, said Howard.

In this case, Iomax plugged in its technology and pointed it toward where James was supposed to be. They found no phone signals.

“It looks as if the phone was already dead,” Howard said.

That type of technology does two things: it pinpoints the location of a live cell phone, and in very remote cases, it creates a coverage grid where one didn’t exist before.

Howard has the following suggestions for those who get stuck in remote conditions with cell phones:

“Keep it dry. The warmer and dryer a phone is, the longer the battery life. Keep the cell phone close to your body in survival situations.

If you don’t know where you are, try to call 911 and describe your general location and situation. If your phone has a very weak signal, save the battery by shutting off the phone.

“The weaker the signal, the ‘louder’ the phone has to shout to reach the tower,” Howard said. And that drains the battery.

“If you can’t reach 911, establish a regular, traceable cell-phone pattern.

Turn on the phone a few times during daylight hours and try to make a call. But only leave the phone on for a specific length of time then turn it off. That saves the battery and develops an electronic cell signal pattern.

As in the case of the Kim family, the phone can establish a brief connection with a nearby tower and leave a digital fingerprint that can identify the phone that made it.

Howard suggested turning on the phone roughly the same two or three times each day, leaving it on for 10 to 20 minutes – long enough for the phone company to spot the pattern and realize a person in distress is signaling a location.

“Understand conditions. The worst thing, especially on the first day one is lost, is leaving the phone on, he said. “If you can’t talk on it, you’re wasting the battery,” he said. He suggested keeping it off the first day, so that a search is more likely to have started when you begin the daily on-off pattern.

“During the Mt. Hood rescue, the phone should have been powered down at night or in blizzard conditions, when no one would have been attempting a rescue,” said Howard.

“If possible, hike to the highest ground or area and hold the phone away from your body or high in the air, so it has no obstructions to a possible tower. That might give the phone an easier path to connect with a cell tower, said Eric Anderson, director of engineering for Edge Wireless in Bend. It was a worker for Edge Wireless who first noticed the “ping” from the Kim phone to a cell tower.

The Kim case also underlined the limits of having GPS tracking systems, such as the OnStar communication network used on many vehicles.

The Kims didn’t have OnStar, a well-known commercial tracking service sold with most new vehicles. If they had had OnStar, it would have helped identify their location on a map in front of them. It might have guided Kim correctly to a more-traveled road and contact with other drivers, Howard said.

But the OnStar network couldn’t have communicated with them, since OnStar operators can only reach someone using that technology through a cell-tower that has a strong signal.