DICKINSON — A woman suffering from a broken back was found by rescue crews Thursday night after officials used global positioning technology to locate her cell phone signal.
Suzette Almas, 35, of Spring had been thrown from a personal watercraft onto the banks of Dickinson Bayou. She was listed in fair condition at University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston on Friday afternoon.
According to sheriff’s officials, the woman was driving a personal watercraft around a curve on the bayou at about 8 p.m. Thursday when she lost control and crashed into a bulkhead.
“She hit it like a missile,” said Dickinson Police Chief Ron Morales.
She was thrown off the craft and landed on the northern bank of the bayou, about two miles east of the Dickinson Bayou Boat Ramp on state Highway 3, he said.
At the time, neither rescue crews nor Almas knew where she was.
She did not even know which side of the bayou she was on, said Bobby Wright, the executive director of the Galveston County Emergency Communications District.
She used her cell phone to call 9-1-1. One of the first things Wright wanted to know was what type of phone she using.
The county’s 9-1-1 dispatch center has software that can locate a person’s cell phone signal and bring it up on a map, he said. Because different cell phone companies use different technologies, however, not all signals can be located with the software.
“It actually puts a map onto the computer screen,” he said. “It’ll even give a degree of accuracy that it thinks it has.”
When the woman told dispatchers that she was using a Verizon phone, Wright believed the software would be able to locate the signal.
But it did not work, so rescue crews had to resort to other methods to locate her, Morales said.
Rescue workers turned on their sirens and dispatchers asked the woman if she could hear them, he said. She was asked to describe her surroundings.
For an hour, rescue crews searched for the woman with no luck, said Capt. Melvin Mason of the police department.
Finally, dispatchers were able to zone in on the Almas’ phone signal, Wright said.
It was then that rescue crews realized they were searching in the wrong area of the bayou, Morales said.
A Dickinson police officer was sent to the area pointed out by the GPS software. Within 15 minutes she was found, Wright said.
“That cell phone saved her life,” Morales said.
Lt. Chuck Walsh of the sheriff’s office said only Sprint, Verizon and Nextel sell phones with a GPS device built into it like the one Almas was using.
If people are interested in buying these types of phones, they should ask for them specifically, Walsh said.
“It worked out well,” Wright said. “Several years ago, we wondered if we’d ever be able to accomplish this because locating cell phones wasn’t as easy as we thought it would be.”
