The text landed at Grand County’s 911 dispatch center Friday afternoon.
“Trapped by fire” it read, pinging a location near the remote Meadow Creek Reservoir.
The 911 text from an Apple iPhone came through the company’s new satellite technology, which enables users out of cellphone range to use passing satellites to send text messages.
“We have not had one of those before, so we triggered a pretty healthy response,” said Grand County Sheriff Brett Schroetlin, who rallied his search and rescue team, fire department, law enforcement and emergency services 40 minutes up a rural dirt road to the reservoir.
And there was no fire. Or anyone needing help.
At the same time Friday, several other 911 dispatch centers across the state got similar texts.
“Multiple people on fire.”
“Single person on fire.”
“Stranded and lost.”
“Trapped by fire.”
And when search and rescue teams responded, they found no emergency situations.
In the past week or so, 911 dispatch centers in about 10 rural Colorado counties have each received about 10 of these awkwardly worded texts seeking help. All of them were unfounded. And all of them are coming from iPhones using Apple’s new satellite texting feature.
At first, there was a palpable fear that pranksters were “swatting” search and rescue teams, mirroring a more common and disturbing trend of making hoax calls to 911 to dispatch armed police officers to a particular address.
“It sure felt like a swatting issue,” Schroetlin said, drawing comparisons to the swarm of bomb threats received by schools and synagogues across Colorado in January 2024.
The sheriff spent the weekend calling Apple and the phone number that triggered the 911 call.
It took a few days before he heard back from Apple.
“They are looking into it. They are not calling it a glitch but they are definitely saying it was not malicious,” he said. “It’s not swatting or a hoax.”
He also reached the woman who owned the phone and she reported issues with turning the device off.
Emails to Apple’s media relations department were not immediately returned this week.
Boulder County 911 dispatchers received several of the 911 texts and Friday the Boulder County Sheriff’s Office sent deputies to the Kelly Dahl Campground near Nederland in response to a call for help. The owner of the phone was there and did not need any assistance.
“I spoke with our division chief and his opinion is that it’s some glitch in the Apple system,” Boulder County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Vinnie Montez said.
This is not the first time that Colorado’s mountain-region 911 dispatchers have been frustrated by Apple technology. In late 2022, ski town emergency call centers were overwhelmed by calls from a robot voice sharing precise locations of a potentially injured party with an Apple iPhone or watch. The devices were deploying a crash or fall detection feature that automatically called 911 when the user endured a sudden stop, like in a car crash. Or, it turns out, a sudden skid and stop while skiing.
Each of the calls – more than 70 over one December weekend in 2024 in Summit County, for example – required resources to figure out. None were emergencies. Apple eventually adjusted its technology so users could more easily disable the crash feature.
Jeff Sparhawk, the head of the Colorado Search and Rescue Association, wonders if rescue teams across the country are getting similar calls.
“It’s potentially taking resources and putting responders at risk,” he said. “I would hate to see somebody who needs our services not get help – or see help delayed – because we are responding to an unfounded activation.”
Sparhawk is quick to not assign blame to iPhone users or even Apple. The new satellite texting capability can certainly be helpful for people who need help when they are out of range of cellphone towers.
In 2022, rescue teams and emergency responders were able to urge users to turn off the crash detection feature on their phones when they went skiing. Sparhawk isn’t sure what to tell people this time around.
Every rescue team in the state is aware of the potentially unfounded texts landing at call centers, Sparhawk said. They seem to be coming from iPhones when no one is even handling them. The texts don’t really sound like people, he said.
“It almost seems like these are something from a list of canned messages that are going out,” Sparhawk said.
People who place calls for backcountry search and rescue assistance are never charged for services in Colorado. And volunteer teams always respond to every call for help. Calls into 911 are never outright dismissed, Sparhawk said.
“But there is a potential now that if a team gets a message from an iPhone over satellite and it says ‘multiple people on fire,’ we will respond of course, but that response might be more measured,” Sparhawk said.
