A dad saved the lifetime of a farmer who was nearly crushed to death by half a ton of hay in a serious outdoor mishap — by utilizing an app to guide an emergency medical team to the agricultural location.
Michael Moss, 39, had been eating lunch outside in his yard when he heard distant screams for help coming from the fields behind his home in Worksop, in Nottinghamshire, England, in line with SWNS, a British news agency.
Moss ran in the final direction of the anguished cries.
There, he found an idle tractor — and nearby, a farmer who was trapped underneath a 1,000-pound industrial-sized bale of hay, said SWNS.
The farmer, known only as “Stephen,” was pinned to the bottom from the waist down and in excruciating pain.
He was screaming, “Help me!”
Moss tried to budge the heavy bale of himself with no luck.
So he dialed 999 — the number to dial for emergencies within the U.K. — but knew he couldn’t guide the ambulance to the precise location since it was so rural.
The daddy told SWNS that, pondering quickly, he decided to make use of his what3words app — which provides an accurate location for emergency services using three randomized words as a code.
What3words Limited, based in London, owns the app. The system encodes geographic coordinates into three permanently fixed dictionary words.
Once Moss told the emergency call handlers the words “dads,” “scorched” and “hairstyle,” medics were capable of pinpoint where he was to inside a 3 meter-square radius.
Moss, a dad of two, told SNWS, “It had been my daughter’s sixth birthday on June 23 … I used to be working and had been eating a sandwich outside before my next meeting.”
He said it was nearly 1:30 p.m. and that he could “hear a noise coming from about half a kilometer away” — a little bit over 1 / 4 of a mile away.
“Where we live could be very rural,” he said. “While you hear something unusual, you twitch your head. I heard it 3 times and thought, ‘That’s definitely not a superb noise.’ I had to analyze what the noise was.”
He added, “I ran through the woodland in my flip-flops … [I] could hear, ‘Help me!’ as I got closer. A male voice was screaming, ‘Help me!’”
Moss said, “I could see a tractor cab parked. I used to be apprehensive what I used to be going to face now — [was] he impaled, etc.? Who knows. That actually triggered, ‘How am I going to cope with this?’”
He said he found the farmer “severely injured under the hay bale. It’s not the very first thing you’d think to see.”
He said he’d approached the tractor from behind and saw that “something [had] fallen from the forks that he’s been working on,” SWNS reported.
Said Moss, “I saw the hay bale and a top half of a body. I attempted to shoulder-barge this huge half-ton hay bale, but that didn’t work.”
So he asked the person “if he was losing blood, how the pain was. I used to be attempting to get it for the 999 call. He told me to grab the phone for 999.”
Moss said, “I used to be occupied with learn how to describe where I [was] for emergency services. A previous boss worked in emergency services and said I should download what3words, but this was the primary time I’d ever used it.”
He added, “As I’m on 999, they ask where we’re. I said, ‘I’ve got what3words’ and so they said that was good … [The emergency call handler] knew exactly where I used to be immediately.”
Paramedics arrived on the scene quarter-hour later and administered pain relief to the farmer, SNWS said. They transported him to the closest hospital, which was an hour away.
Moss said he was also capable of help the farmer call his farmhands — who also arrived on the scene to “attempt to shift the heavy bales.”
Said Moss, “There was one other hay bale above him. It had slipped. That was above his head [and] it was beginning to slip near his head.”
Added Moss, “You can hear the relief after we got the hay bale off and he tried to maneuver about … The most effective solution to describe his lower body [is that it] was like a squashed frog. His leg was in an unnatural [position].”
Farmer Stephen suffered severe trauma to his pelvis and femur, but Moss believes it might have been much worse if he hadn’t got there when he did, SWNS said.
Moss said, “Those three minutes I had with what3words made all of the difference … The phone signal is an area of contention. It’s not great there. What3words gives you [is] something you’ll be able to do offline — using three words to avoid wasting your life.”
What3words works by dividing the globe right into a grid of squares, with each square given a novel combination of three words, noted SWNS.
The digital-mapping company was launched in July 2013.
