How do you give directions to the fire service when you do not know what road you are on?

[ARW]

Basically between two villages. No houses, no pubs nothing (apart from a field on fire).

You know the names of the villages and that is all.

Could the phone operator not work it out?

[Tim+]

Optimist! I?ve found trying to give positions to emergency services an incredibly frustrating experience. The main problem being that they?ve not heard of the internet and search engines. Also, it takes an age to get through to anyone who can understand grid references or any normal system of identifying position that doesn?t involve street names and house numbers.

?What three words? seems like a nice idea but I don?t hold out much hope of any operator understanding the idea.

Tim

[Adrian]

In message <PWG2F.357826$ [e-mail], ARW [e-mail]> writes

Would they be able to work with What Three Words ?

Adrian

[ARW]

Field on fire next to the road between Branton and Auckley?

[Dave Liquorice]

And also relies on you having a useable mobile data connection to look up the three words for the random bit of burning country side.

[Adrian]

?

[newshound]

I believe that some emergency services are now using it. (It's something we have been discussing in the context of bridleway users).

[newshound]

Just tried that link, when I hit the "current location" button it drops the pin about half a mile north of me.

[newshound]

This is on a desktop, with no GPS of course. OTOH Google Maps on the same machine finds the right house.

[Andy Burns]

[whatthreewords]

On my laptop (similarly no GPS) the locate button pops up a permission dialogue from the browser, if I say "yes" then W3W gets the correct position, right down to the correct quarter of the house ... but the laptop and my mobile are both signed-in on the same google account, and the phone has GPS enabled (also WiFi triangulation works pretty well).

[Brian Gaff]

Do you not have a satnave or a reasonable mobile phone with a gps app?

It used to be a big problem, but these days not so much. Assuming its not miles from anywhere you surely know the road, as otherwise why would you know to go on it? Brian

[Brian Gaff]

The thing is I seem to have no issues, but I imagine if its a sparsely populated area, the place you are talking to may well be well away and there is no local knowledge. Somehow hear in London they tell me where I am if I've rung from a mobile of recent vintage. Obviously I've only had to do it recently about twice, but I guess some of the larger call handling centres being not local is the main issue. Brian

[spuorgelgoog]

London has addresses.

Try being in the country where there aren't even road names (and C roads aren't numbered on maps)

Owain

[Harry Bloomfield, Esq.]

Seems to work extremely well on my Iphone, using its built in GPS, to within yards. My Iphone seems to improve its GPS position data, over the the first several seconds, so I'm guessing it uses an averaging technique.

I recall once knocking on the door of a fire station, to advise them that the field right in front of the fire station was on fire. With the fire clearly visible over my shoulder, they wanted me to give them the address of the fire.

[Brian Reay]

We have a perfectly good systems in the UK, the OS Grid System and Lat Long, which you can access from most phones, car sat navs etc and the Emergency services use, and are far more well known than things like what3words.

What3words is and amusing toy, especially if you find the words somehow link to the location but whereas an appropriate OS grid reference is still useful, change one word in what3words and .......

[Theo]

Sounds like trouble on the phone:

out next to the Beijing River.

And

forwards to: is Charing Cross underground station.

- an fact every unknown sequence forwards to Charing Cross.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

with != width

unpicked != unpacked

[nightjar]

I wouldn't bet on it.

I called an ambulance a few years ago to a junction of two named roads. The call handler was in a different county, so didn't know the area and one of the roads was newer than the ambulance's satnav database. I had to talk the ambulance in from a place they could find, about half a mile away at the start of the road that was on their database.

[Martin Brown]

I just tried it and it places me just to the south of York - which is wrong by about 50 miles and not even in the right Riding of Yorkshire.

We fairly recently discovered that the official gazette of postcodes had our village hall "officially" located in the middle of a farm field - which was where the secretary lived back in the 1960's. It has now been corrected. Firebrigade apparently use some odd building code or other so it isn't clear whether the wrong official postcode would have been a problem. Noone lives there and it has no postbox (hence no actual code).

[Andy Burns]

But what geolocation facilities does your phone/laptop/desktop have available/enabled? W3W has to rely on that ...