Local emergency officials say a rise in automatic crash-detection alerts from vehicles and smartphones is leading to unnecessary responses, sometimes sending more than a dozen units racing to scenes where no crash has occurred.
During a recent meeting of the Emergency Preparedness Working Committee, Public Safety Director Jeremy Smith, 911 Director Paul Nave, Daviess County Sheriff Brad Youngman, and Daviess County Fire Department Chief Eric Coleman said they are working on ways to verify these calls more efficiently without delaying help when it’s truly needed.
Nave explained that dispatchers receive two kinds of alerts: telematics from vehicles that report airbag deployment or impact data, and crash-detection signals from phones and smart watches. The first category is generally reliable, he said, but phone-based detections are increasingly triggering false alarms.
“I took a call the other day where a lady was just driving, and her phone slid into the floorboard, and it called 911 as a crash detection,” Nave said.
He and others noted additional situations where individuals left a phone on a hood or bumper and it bounced onto the roadway, or where kids hit a bump in a UTV and a phone flew off — all of which triggered alerts, none of which involved an actual crash.
“We’re getting a lot of false positives on crash detection now,” Nave said.
Still, he emphasized that Apple’s crash-detection technology can work well, and that ignoring alerts outright isn’t an option. Youngman agreed.
“These false alerts are a big concern, but we can’t not respond because it could be an incident where someone runs off the road, hits a tree, and gets knocked out,” Youngman said. “We’ve got to find somewhere in the middle.”
Coleman said DCFD currently adjusts its response based on factors such as time of day, location, and the number of calls coming in. An alert on a rural highway at 2 a.m. is more likely to be an actual wreck, he said, whereas a crash detection on the bypass at 2 p.m. with no supporting reports is more likely to be false. But because a potential wreck on the bypass could involve multiple vehicles and injuries, a large number of units may still respond — sometimes excessively.
“When I see seven or eight little dots on my screen, that’s how many trucks are heading that way,” Youngman said. “Then I open the call and see it’s crash detection. I automatically remind everyone: no other calls, try to call the phone back before we commit the whole world to this.”
Smith said they are reviewing data and recordings to identify patterns dispatchers can use to better classify these calls. Coordinates provided by most devices also help responders verify whether anything is actually at the reported location.
“We don’t want to abstain from responding,” Smith said. “We’re just going to modify how we respond, no different than how we handle fire alarms. If someone gets there and verifies that nothing happened, everyone else can cancel.”
Officials said any indication of an actual emergency — a caller on the line, a witness report, or a dispatcher hearing distress in the background — would immediately escalate a response.
“There’s no hesitation there,” Smith said.
The challenge is greater in the county, where longer travel distances and higher-speed roadways create more risk. Volunteer availability is also harder to predict, especially during daytime hours.
“Our volunteers save us, but they have to work,” Smith said. “There are times of day when we don’t know who will be available to roll an engine. That’s part of why these responses can get so large.”
Smith added that the County’s planned public safety facility on U.S. 231 — which will centralize Daviess County Fire, emergency management, and other support services — should help streamline responses by ensuring consistent staffing and reducing reliance on volunteers during certain hours.
Youngman said departments statewide are dealing with the same issue as more devices adopt automated crash reporting.
“Everybody is having to modify their protocols so they’re not sending multiple units to false alarms over and over again,” he said.
Despite the challenges, all the local emergency response leaders emphasized that safety remains the priority.
“There’s a huge penalty for failure,” Youngman said. “We just want to avoid putting people in danger racing to something that doesn’t exist, while still making sure we’re there when someone truly needs us.”
