An Cosantóir

www.military.ie the defence forces magazine | 17 When a person in distress calls 999 the operator goes through a series of questions to determine what assistance is needed. If a heli is required the call is passed to the NACC desk which initiates the LocateMe112 message to get the caller's location. When the caller receives the text mes- sage and clicks on the link ,the coding behind the link does three things concur- rently: it looks for the last cached location on the phone prior to the call; it activates the GPS chip which takes three minutes to fully activate; and it carries out cell mast triangulation. A typical call will take three minutes to locate the position of the phone to within ten feet. As the general location will be identified immediately the heli can be dispatched without delay and LocateMe112 will provide the exact location en route - thus saving valuable time from initial call to the heli's arrival. The following are some examples of how Lo- cateMe112 has been used in the past few months. A family of four got lost in Cratloe Woods, Co Clare, in August 2014. Mountain rescue teams tasked by NACC were unable to locate the family, but a rescue heli from Shannon used Lo- cateMe112, which was still on trial at the time, to locate the father's phone and direct the ground rescue team to the location. In the same month a doctor at the scene of a STEMI in Co Roscommon called for an ambulance on his week-old smartphone (a present from his daughter). The STEMI call was put through to the NACC desk operator who sent him the text from LocateMe112 and dispatched a heli, which was able to locate the patient and get him to the nearest hospital in Galway within 40 minutes. The doctor said the patient would have died where it not for the heli's rapid intervention. The application, now being co-ordinated by the NACC, is available to other agencies across Ireland including the HSE, An Garda Síochána, the Coast Guard and other emergency service providers. Since its introduction late last year LocateMe112 has been a great suc- cess and in the first two months of 2015, the system has been used suc- cessfully on five different occasions. The new system is a source of huge pride to the Air Corps. Capt O'Dowd said: "It's great to see LocateMe112 being used so successfully by so many us- ers. It is innovations such as this application and people like Lt Gallagher that help the Air Corps develop and expand." © Owen Breslin/Sunday World

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