Elderly Couple Dies After AT&T Drops Nine Calls for Help

Locutus

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Jun 18, 2007
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Outstanding.


Madeleine Morris survived Nazi-occupied France, and went on to happily marry a wonderfully trained musician. Then she went on a trip the country, where their car slammed into a ditch. Nine dropped AT&T calls later, they were both dead. This certainly puts your dubious AT&T coverage in perspective, don't it? The ol' dropped call in your apartment suddenly doesn't seem so bad, reports the NY Daily News:

Stuck in a ditch just 60 feet from their Catskills vacation home, Arthur and Madeleine Morris, devoted to each other for nearly 50 years, desperately dialed for help nine times. Nine times, the call would not go through - so the panicked seniors tried to escape themselves, with disastrous results. Arthur, 88, was smothered trying to crawl out of the Ford Fusion, while brave wife Madeleine, 89, trekked to a road but died of exposure after a rainy night under a tarp.
The ill-fated trip to the Catskills reveals a truth about cell coverage across the country, whether it be Big Blue or Big Red: it sucks in the woods. These deaths were due largely to the frailty of the victims, but if it'd been an able bodied couple, they could have been equally screwed to death. Simply, carriers don't care about backcountry—even in a bourgeois vacation area like the Catskills, where the service is pretty spotty even by AT&T's own records. There aren't enough people to warrant building up antennae—especially when we're all bitching about how poor the reception is in Manhattan and San Francisco.

But we're dependent on these things, our phones. We rely on them to the point that we hope they'll keep us from dying. And in many parts of a big continent, you'll have to take your chances. And just remember: Verizon might kill you too! [NY Daily News]




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Ron in Regina

"Voice of the West" Party
Apr 9, 2008
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Regina, Saskatchewan
Might just be me, but this story reads funny (funny-weird, not funny-ha-ha)
to me. What I'm stumbling on are these two sentances from the same
paragraph:

".....Stuck in a ditch just 60 feet from their Catskills vacation home...."

&

"....while brave wife Madeleine, 89, trekked to a road but died of
exposure after a rainy night under a tarp."
 

Niflmir

A modern nomad
Dec 18, 2006
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Leiden, the Netherlands
Might just be me, but this story reads funny (funny-weird, not funny-ha-ha)
to me. What I'm stumbling on are these two sentances from the same
paragraph:

".....Stuck in a ditch just 60 feet from their Catskills vacation home...."

&

"....while brave wife Madeleine, 89, trekked to a road but died of
exposure after a rainy night under a tarp."

I'm pretty sure the bandages they have in their vacation home aren't enough for internal bleeding. Probably they don't have a land line there.

This sort of thing wouldn't happen if national frequency monopolies weren't handed out by the governments. Frequency ownership should be treated like trademark ownership: you don't put a cell out in the woods on that frequency, but somebody else does, they now own it. You'd see pretty wide coverage if they actually needed to fight for it.
 

SLM

The Velvet Hammer
Mar 5, 2011
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London, Ontario
Might just be me, but this story reads funny (funny-weird, not funny-ha-ha)
to me. What I'm stumbling on are these two sentances from the same
paragraph:

".....Stuck in a ditch just 60 feet from their Catskills vacation home...."

&

"....while brave wife Madeleine, 89, trekked to a road but died of
exposure after a rainy night under a tarp."

From the article, it actually appears to have happened in the driveway, which from the picture appears to be very a narrow and winding lane way. It does seem somewhat weird that she would not go back up to the house but I'm sure she must have been at least a little traumatized and probably disoriented by the ordeal. Especially having just watched her husband die in front of her. :(

It's sad but don't they always say that you're more likely to get into an accident close to home?

Maybe a much better idea than cell phones would be to have On Star type of service available if you are in a remote area? I really don't know too much about them, but I would imagine it's much more reliable service.