Google Maps works with first responders and city officials around the world to help them be better prepared for natural disasters and other emergencies by using map visualizations to track problems and plan recovery scenarios. Today, more than 80% of emergency calls come from mobile devices. However, locating these people can be difficult, especially with inaccurate tools, such as the triangulation of mobile phone towers and GPS. Google created Android's Emergency Location Service (ELS) to quickly send more accurate and, in some regions, contextual location information to emergency services when a user calls or sends a text message to an emergency number.
While some countries have made improvements in the accuracy of their location to respond to emergencies over the years, the changes have been slow and small-scale. As stories arrive from around the world, EENA and Google continue to work to expand and perfect the technology. Every time an emergency call is made from an Android phone in a country where ELS has been implemented, the coordinates are now automatically sent to emergency services. ELS is currently present in more than 20 countries on 5 continents and helps provide location information for 2 million emergency calls a day.
Before the ELS, many first responders could locate emergency calls based solely on the location of the nearest mobile phone towers, with a potential range of up to 20 kilometers. Fortunately, the ELS had been implemented in Lithuania three months earlier, and the emergency services operator received the Nojuh location within a radius of 6 meters.2.
