07/16/2026
🚨ASK A FIREFIGHTER!🚒
Q: I dropped my phone the other day and it automatically tried to make an emergency call. What would happen if I hadn’t turned it off?
A: 🧑‍🚒That’s a pretty new and evolving circumstance for us! Many phones are now capable of automatically calling 911 for you in an emergency, even if you become unconscious. Usually these notifications can be turned on or off in your phone settings, but just like you’re getting used to these new features on your phone, we’re getting used to how to handle these types of circumstances. It’s evolving but is a cool piece of technology that has helped save lives even here in Boone County!
When our dispatch center first started getting these calls, we began immediately treating them as a report of a vehicle crash (we call them Automated Crash Notifications or ACNs). Over time, things have changed a bit and are still evolving as we learn how we feel it is best to handle them. We won’t pretend to know the inner workings of our dispatch center (they’re pros and most of what they do is WAY over our heads!) but typically effort is made to contact the owner of the phone but pretty quickly if contact can’t be made, someone goes looking.
Oftentimes, these turn out to be a phone that was left sitting on the outside of a car or took a hard fall somewhere that the owner couldn’t safely reach while driving, but several of these have turned out to be actual vehicle crashes and some of them have been pretty major. When our firefighters are dispatched to these, we treat them as if they’re the real thing until we know otherwise. Our firefighters are gearing up and getting ready to cut someone free from a crunched up vehicle every time we get dispatched to a vehicle crash and ACNs are no different. We’d rather be prepared and not needed, than needed and not prepared. Usually if it is an actual crash our dispatch center starts receiving 911 calls within a few minutes of the ACN but it has happened that a vehicle crashed in the county in the middle of the night and the only notification we received was the driver’s cell phone automatically calling.
Our firefighters are always here to help, even if sometimes it’s just reuniting a smashed up phone with its disappointed owner!
Excellent question! Stay safe, Boone!
