[RTC List] Kudos to RTC Members Edge Wireless: Engineers Help Locate Stranded Family in OR

[bikerat69 at netscape.net]

Lucky text messages led engineers to missing San Francisco family
- By MARCUS WOHLSEN, Associated Press Writer
Tuesday, December 5, 2006

(12-05) 17:43 PST San Francisco (AP) --

Technology, some lucky text messages and an outdoorsman's intuition 
helped locate three members of a family stranded in the Oregon 
backcountry for nine days.

Searchers rescued Kati Kim, 30, of San Francisco and her daughters 
Penelope, 4, and Sabine, 7 months, along a remote forest road Monday 
afternoon. The key to finding them, police said, was a "ping" from one 
of the family's cell phones that helped narrow down their location.

According to one of two cell phone engineers who honed in on the Kims, 
the chance of the split-second signal making it through the rugged 
mountains was "very slim."

"It was just a hunch that we could help. And we followed up on the 
hunch," said Eric Fuqua, 39, an engineer for Edge Wireless who 
contacted authorities to offer his services in the search. Edge 
Wireless provides cell phone coverage in southern Oregon, and is a 
member of Cingular Wireless' network.

Fuqua and his co-worker, Noah Pugsley, started digging through computer 
records of cell phone traffic Saturday and learned that one of the 
Kims' cell phones had received two text messages around 1:30 a.m. on 
Nov. 26, the day after the family was last seen at a restaurant in 
Roseburg, Ore.

The engineers were able to trace a "ping" from the Kims' phone when it 
received the text messages. They located not only the cell tower in 
Glendale, Ore., from which the messages were relayed, but a specific 
area west of the town where the phone received them.

With the family's possible location narrowed down, the pair used 
computer software to create a map predicting what parts of the 
mountainous region received any cell phone coverage at all.

Fuqua then relied on his extensive experience traveling the heavily 
forested back roads as both a fisherman and a technician, he said, to 
guess the course the family may have taken as they headed from the 
mountains toward the coast.

The engineers' sleuthing led searchers to focus on Bear Camp Road.

The rescued members of the Kim family were found with their snowbound 
car just off Bear Camp Road, which Fuqua called "impossible" terrain to 
navigate for anyone with no knowledge of the area.

The complicated network of roads in the area is commonly used by 
whitewater rafters on the Rogue River or as summer shortcuts to Gold 
Beach — the Kims' destination when they went missing. The roads are not 
plowed in winter.

James Kim, 35, remained the focus of a massive search effort Tuesday, 
three days after he left the Saab station wagon in search of help 
Saturday morning.

Searchers were lucky that the Kims received a cell phone signal at all 
in an area with "very, very sparse coverage," Fuqua said. "Every now 
and then, if you go slow enough, you'll hit our towers for just one 
second in that one spot," he said.

The text messages also had to have been sent during the small window of 
time between when the Kims last lost their cell phone signal and then 
regained it briefly near the spot where they were stranded, Fuqua said.

Details of the contents of the text messages and who sent them have not 
been released.

But law enforcement officials said the engineers' analysis of the 
messages was the critical breakthrough that searchers needed to 
ultimately spot three of the Kims by helicopter as Kati Kim waved an 
umbrella marked "SOS."

"From what I understand about (Fuqua's) help in this case, as far as 
I'm concerned he's a hero to me," said Inspector Angela Martin, who led 
the San Francisco police's investigation into the Kim's disappearance.


URL: 
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/n/a/2006/12/05/financial/f164
146S30.DTL
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