U.S. Filmmaker Dan Woolley was in Haiti when he was crushed and trapped inside by a pile of rubble sent down by the quake. He used a first-aid app in his iPhone to get out alive:
After being crushed by a pile of rubble, Woolley used his digital SLR to illuminate his surroundings and snap photos of the wreckage in search of a safe place to dwell. He took refuge in an elevator shaft, where he followed instructions from an iPhone first-aid app to fashion a bandage and tourniquet for his leg and to stop the bleeding from his head wound, according to an MSNBC story.
The app even warned Woolley not to fall asleep if he felt he was going into shock, so he set his cellphone’s alarm clock to go off every 20 minutes. Sixty-five hours later, a French rescue team saved him.
The most amazing part of this story? An iPhone’s battery lasting 65 hours.
@1 FTW. No further comments necessary.
“Bleeding to death under a ton of rubble in a third world country? There’s an app for that!”
Sorry @2, DOUG.’s comment made me laugh out loud in my office.
Win.
Well, hell, I went with a Blackberry instead of an iPhone. Guess I’m screwed…
@1 Damn, beat me to it.
Kudos for having a first aid app on his phone; he didn’t download that after the earthquake. I wonder if he was a boy scout?
Wow. That’s actually really cool.
hahaha…so many FTW comments, well done
So awesome to hear of stories like his amidst all the tragedy. Just imagine if Haitians had also been able to afford that type of technology how many lives would have been saved.
#1 it’s actually not unlikely at all. The thing that drains the iphone battery is the phone/wifi radios. Put an iphone in “airplane mode”, which turns both of those off, and you’ll easily get 65 hours of life, assuming you don’t try to keep the screen on constantly for those 65 hours.
@2 is correct re @1 ftw.
Me, I’d rather have a certain hot Latina from Desperado do first aid on me …
Ironic that a piece of technology that would be impossible without the efforts of scientists saved the life of this man, who’s since gone on to credit “god” with saving him.
Ironic if you’re a shitheel idiot. What do you do helpme that makes you feel qualified to speak for scientists the vast majority of whom have the smarts to realize that he needed a whole shit-ton of luck in addition to “science” to get out of there alive. You’re obviously not a scientist, you’re just a fuckwit evangelical atheists science groupie.
Well, it was a lot of different things that saved him. The impulse to download the app. The rubble not instantly killing him. Being able to follow the instructions and having them work. Being found in a few days instead of a few weeks. Some people would call the combination of those things God. I wouldn’t, but I’d probably feel more grateful to the universe at large than I would to a few scientists in such a situation.
Bullshit.
@10: It’s not the technology, but the knowledge. You don’t need an iPhone to learn practical first aid techniques.
@10 Just imagine if the iphone were available to people on ANY network!
..fucking tmobile phone options..
@ 18,
Yeah, that would suck. Can you imagine the commercial?
“Little Timmy would have easily been able to summon Lassie if only he had the right wireless plan”
Had his phone used Windows Mobile it would have given him the blue screen of death.
When I first read this story I thought it said he fashioned a tourniquet for his head wound.
Sadly the the vast majority of the Hatians who actually live there, don’t have access to Digital cameras or iPhones.
how sad is this world when people need to turn to an iphone app for common medical sense, or require technological intervention from taking a permanent dirt nap. a casio watch, LED flashlight, and a business-sized “stop the bleeding, duh!” card would have done the same thing. or, in the 1800’s, a few matches and matching sense of common.
@14
I hope you’re enjoying your computer, electricity, and internet access.