iPhone falling from ute triggers 'emergency' in outback NSW

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When Charli Cullen's mobile phone triggered its crash alert, emergency services scrambled to track her down on a remote property in the far west of New South Wales.

However, Ms Cullen hadn't been in an accident.

The 19-year-old's phone had slipped off the back of her ute, prompting the alert.

Ms Cullen said she was out checking water troughs on Kars Station, 70 kilometres south of Broken Hill, when she lost her phone.

"Me dad sent me out to grab some water and … I got to the second water tank and I stupidly enough put me phone on the back of the ute," she said.

I've headed to the next [trough] and out of habit I've looked for me phone and gone, 'Ah no, I reckon I've left it on the back of the tray and it's probably on the ground somewhere now.'

I was going mental. I was running around, searching everywhere, but it was nowhere to be found.

Terry Smith, the local bloke who's also the captain of the Netley Rural Fire Brigade, was called out, along with other emergency services from Menindee and Broken Hill.

"The Menindee RFS blokes responded – I reckon they turned up with three trucks," he said.

G'day mate, the Sunset Strip bloke came back with one, and I was part of that, plus three or four other coppers.

Crews spent almost an hour searching for Ms Cullen before they finally located her on the way back from getting a drink of water.

Technology on the rise

Technology commentator Trevor Long said crash detection tech had been available for around two to three years prior to its inclusion on Apple's iPhone 14 in 2022.

"They literally did crash testing with their devices to figure out how a phone and other devices behave in a crash, compared to just dropping a phone," he said.

Mr Long said that companies like Samsung were also introducing this feature to their mobile phones.

He said the benefits of the technology far outweighed the handful of instances where it might cause an unintended reaction.

"It's very difficult to tell whether a phone falling out of a ute or a ute being crashed into something is what's happened," he said.

Although feeling a bit self-conscious, Ms Cullen expressed her gratitude for the prompt response.

"It's also reassuring to know that if you're unresponsive, your phone will do it for you – it was a pretty surreal experience," she said.

Barrier Local Area Command Acting Superintendent Keith Price said NSW police were receiving a lot more reports from mobile phones.

He said the majority of calls were legitimate, and he believed overall the technology assisted police and emergency services.

"The best thing about it is it gives us an exact location of where the watch or the phone is via the GPS location," he said.

Nearest crossroad not close

Mr Smith said the initial reference given by the Rural Fire Service was the nearest crossroads, which was 30kms away.

He said he'd like to see procedures put in place where the precise location details are provided initially.

"As I said to my local supervisor, the Netley Brigade covers about 14,000 square kilometres and it's got two sealed roads and four unsealed roads, and not a lot of intersections, so you can't really use the intersections as a reference point," Mr Smith said.

They might be 50 or 100 kilometres apart.

In a statement, an RFS spokesperson said the first alert to emergency services from the Apple Relay Centre was to NSW Police.

"The NSW Police gave details of the incident location to other agencies, which then made the initial call to the RFS brigades," the spokesperson said.

Specific details of the location were included in the incident report and were then passed on to the emergency services teams.

The ABC has made contact with Apple for a response.