By Larry Alexander and Ryan Robinson
Intelligencer Journal/New Era
LANCASTER, Pa. — A Lancaster woman’s cell phone played a key role in her rescue early Thursday after her vehicle crashed along Route 222.
Justine McFarland’s Mazda wrecked along Route 222 North near Landis Valley Road around 5 a.m., Manheim Township police said.
The car left the roadway, missed the guardrail, went down an embankment and ended up on its roof in a creek, hidden from sight by heavy undergrowth, Eden Fire Company Sgt. Ryan Spangler said.
Rick Harrison, the county’s emergency management operations manager, told reporters McFarland crawled from her wrecked vehicle and dialed 911. She told a dispatcher she was wet and cold.
Eden Fire Company Capt. Mark Shenk said he believed rescuers determined the woman’s location using signals given off by her cell phone’s GPS and area cell towers.
When police first arrived and walked along the road, trees and brush made finding the car tricky, Spangler said. It was found within 10 minutes, however.
About 20 firefighters from area departments responded to the wreck, he said.
Police are still investigating the crash, but Sgt. Tom Rudzinski said Thursday night that McFarland was traveling south when her vehicle crossed over the median, crossed the northbound lanes and crashed on the east side of the road.
McFarland was taken by ambulance to Lancaster General Hospital, where she was treated and released.
Harrison said cell phones often are used to help direct rescuers to accident victims.
“A lot of cell phones are GPS-enabled, so they give us the longitude and latitude of the connection, so we can plot them on a map,” Harrison said.
If the phone is not GPS-enabled, he said, the signal can be triangulated using three cell towers. This “is not quite as accurate, but it gets you in the area,” he said.
The technology was especially helpful in Thursday’s crash, Harrison said, because the victim’s car left the road “with no guardrail damage and went down an embankment, where no one could have seen it from the road.”
“We took them right to the scene and they parked up above and walked down,” Harrison said.
Using a cell phone’s signal to track calls and aid people is nothing new, Harrison said.
“We use it every day,” he said. “We’ve used it for people who are lost; they call us and we locate them right away. It’s great stuff.”
Copyright 2011 Lancaster Newspapers, Inc.