VIA: Josh Levs
Beneath layers of rubble after the earthquake in Haiti, Dan Woolley felt blood streaming from his head and leg. Then he remembered — he had an app for that.
Woolley, an aid worker, husband, and father of two boys, followed instructions on his cell phone to survive the January 12 earthquake in Haiti.
Woolley was quoted as saying “I had an app that had pre-downloaded all this information about treating wounds. So I looked up excessive bleeding and I looked up compound fracture.” The application on his iPhone is filled with information about first aid and CPR from the American Heart Association.
“So I knew I wasn’t making mistakes,” Woolley said. “That gave me confidence to treat my wounds properly.”
Trapped in the ruins of the Hotel Montana in Port-au-Prince, he used his shirt to bandage his leg, and tied his belt around the wound. To stop the bleeding on his head, he firmly pressed a sock to it. Concerned he might have been experiencing shock, Woolley used the app to look up what to do. It warned him not to sleep. So he set his phone alarm to go off every 20 minutes.
Once the battery got down to less than 20 percent of its power, Woolley turned it off. By then, he says, he had trained his body not to sleep for long periods, drifting off only to wake up within minutes. After 60 hours of being trapped in the rubble Woolley was rescued.
