Two women have been saved by search and rescue in British Columbia after using the iPhone 14's Emergency SOS via satellite feature after getting stranded in the wilderness.
According to a report from Times Colonist, two women got lost on a trip back to Alberta in December when a closed highway forced them to take a detour through a service road.
The women tried to pass an unplowed road, and got stuck in what rescuers described as a "wall of snow."
The two women were lost "approximately 20 kilometers down the road, stuck in the snow with no one knowing where they were and no cell service."
iPhone 14 to the rescue
Luckily, one of the women had a brand new iPhone 14, and used Apple's best iPhone to hail emergency services using the new Emergency SOS via satellite feature, which can connect users with emergency services using a satellite and question prompts to quickly relay information about their situation to dispatches.
"There's no cell service there but one of them happened to have the new Apple phone that has the SOS in it and activated the SOS," BC Search and Rescue senior manager Dwight Yochim told the outlet.
An Apple call center relayed a message to Northern 911, a call center in Canada which relayed the information to emergency services in B.C.
Thanks to the GPS location, Robson Valley Search and Rescue were able to pinpoint the women, pull their vehicle out of difficulty, and get them on their way. Yochim hailed the technology, saying that Apple's iPhone had saved a scenario involving a search lasting over a week and covering several hundred square kilometers.
Yochim said the feature was a "game changer" that "reduced the search to an exact location of where they were, so there was no search, and the team actually drove in right to where they were and managed to save them.”
Amazingly, Yochim said that to his knowledge, it was the first time anyone had ever used the iPhone 14's Emergency SOS feature in the province.
