At the Bonnaroo music festival in Manchester, Tennessee, nearly 1,000 accidental 911 calls were made to police over a six-day period, overloading the emergency response team.
The Coffee County 911 Communication Center was inundated with accidental emergency calls from the music festival, overwhelming the call center that had just three people working and taking calls, according to WSMV 4.
Many of the calls are believed to have originated from iPhones, which authorities believe initiated from Apple’s new Crash Detection feature on iPhones or Apple Watches.
Crash Detection is designed to “detect severe car crashes” and then “sounds an alarm and displays an alert,” according to Apple’s website. If the user doesn’t respond within 20 seconds, the device will automatically call emergency services.
The Manchester police took to social media and asked festival attendees to disable the crash detection feature on their phones.
However, Apple disputed the claim by authorities and labeled the unwanted phone calls as acts of “butt dialing” and not the potentially life-saving feature.
The 300% increase in daily accidental calls during the festival resulted in over 50 hours of overtime work for city officials, according to official reports.
“A telecommunicator can’t just decide that this sounds like an accidental call and not deal with it,” said Brandon Abley, the Director of Technology with NENA: The 911 Association. “Because of that, it takes a lot of time to deal with these calls and ties up the center,” Abley said.
Bonnaroo, which has a capacity of 80,000 and has sold out on numerous occasions, isn’t the first concert from which 911 calls have caused issues with emergency communications centers in Tennessee.
Rides at the theme park Dollywood have set off emergency calls and prompted park officials to issue a guidance in 2022 in attempt to curb the faux-emergencies.
“We work closely with our local authorities who suggested this may become an issue as smart device usage continues to increase,” a statement from the park said. “We wanted to assist them in preventing these unintended calls by making our guests aware their devices may inadvertently call emergency services during the rides.”
The roller coaster calls were happening up to 50 times per day, WSMV claimed.
Website Roller Coaster 101 also warned Apple users that their phones could be triggered by amusement park rides.
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