Do you know how to give the latitude and longitude of your location when calling emergency services?

Any smartphone can manage it, but you have to know how. Several free apps are available, but you don’t necessarily need them – the phone’s in-built apps can often do the job.

Here’s how to find the “lat and long” on an iPhone (as shown on resus.me, applicable at the time of writing in 2014):

So the above coordinates would be read as:

‘My location is latitude thirty-three degrees, fifty-five minutes, seven seconds South, longitude one hundred fifty degrees, fifty-nine minutes, twenty-three seconds East‘.

Remember exact location is part of the METHANE message to be called in when declaring a major incident.

How precise is this?
A second of latitude is approximately 30 metres. A second of longitude varies in size. At the equator, it is approximately 30 metres, the same size as a second of latitude. The size gradually decreases to zero as the meridians converge at the poles.