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in si de ha lto n. co m O ak vi lle B ea ve r | T hu rs da y, Ju ly 1, 20 21 | 8 oakville.ca The Town of Oakville intends to control weeds in medians and shrub beds along the following roadsides and parks: • Lakeshore Road, Church St, Robinson St, Dunn St, Reynolds St, Navy St, Thomas St, Allan St, Trafalgar Rd, Randall St, Kerr Street, Bronte Rd, East St, Nelson St, Jones St, Marine Dr. Upper Middle Road, Third Line, Dorval Drive, Neyagawa Blvd, Cornwall Rd, Dundas St., Bridge Rd, Rebecca St, within the Town of Oakville • Using the pesticide Finalsan Pro Commercial Concentrate containing active ingredient Soap (ammonium salt of fatty acids) Registration No. 30012 under the Pest Control Products Act (Canada). Commencing on April 19, 2021 weather permitting, and ending October 8, 2021 For further information contact: Service Oakville at 905-845-6601 Collect calls will be accepted from individuals calling long distance. Public notice of pesticide use Halton police are now making use of a special mo- bile app which they say is a game changer when it comes to finding lost people and resolving other types of emergencies. Don't keep me in sus- pense. What is it? The company that offers the app is called What3words. It is a geocode system that has divided the surface of the Earth into 57 trillion squares, that are three me- tres by three metres, and as- signed a unique three-word label to each. You've lost me. How is that going to help Halton police or anyone else? Halton police and other local emergency services regularly get calls from peo- ple who do not know exactly where they are. People who have the What3words app on their mobile device can access it and provide the 911 operator with the three-word desig- nation for the area they are in. Since Halton police are now utilizing What3words they can use that three- word designation to imme- diately determine the per- son's exact location. Halton police Staff Sgt. Stephanie Jamieson said emergency services in the UK and Australia have been using this app since 2019. Halton police had their first success with it in the fall of 2020. First success? What happened? Police said a woman was hiking in a remote area and found a firearm on the bank of a creek. She called police, but was unable to provide them a location because she didn't know where she was. The woman had the What3words app on her phone and was able to give the three-word code to po- lice. Officers identified the lo- cation, found the gun and seized it. I feel like police al- ready have something like this. Can't they al- ready track your cell- phone or something? Jamieson said police can 'ping' a cellphone, but that doesn't give them an exact location, just a general area that might have a radius of hundreds of metres. The What3words app can give police a three me- tre by three metre location. This proved important in February 2021 when a couple from Toronto and their six-year-old son got lost while hiking at Rattle- snake Point Conservation Area in Milton. The mother called 911 at 6:15 p.m., at which point it had already gotten dark. She also said the battery of her phone was about to die. "You could hear her son crying in the background. It was something that we wanted to respond to very quickly," said Jamieson. "We were able to talk the woman through download- ing the app and we were able to have officers at their location in under 25 min- utes." Given the size of the con- servation area, Jamieson noted, the family could have been stuck in the cold for hours had the app not been utilized. OK. Does it have any limitations? Halton Police Communi- cations Supervisor Brian Dodd said the effectiveness of the app decreases some- what when the person using it is indoors, but even here it proved superior to pinging the cellphone. Dodd provided an exam- ple from December 2020 in which a woman called Hal- ton police and said her sis- ter was being held against her will by two men. The victim didn't know where she was but had been able to reach out to her sis- ter by texting. She was afraid her cap- tors would hear her speak- ing if she actually called anyone, Dodd said. Police tried to ping the victim's cellphone, but this resulted in a search area with a radius of 850 metres within an urban setting fea- turing apartment buildings and condos. Police then sent the vic- tim a text containing the What3words app. The victim used this app and police were able to nar- row the search area to a 32- metre radius. Officers ultimately ze- roed in on an apartment within a condo, made two arrests and rescued a vic- tim of human trafficking. How do I get more in- formation about this? You can visit https:// what3words.com. NEW APP A GAMECHANGER FOR FINDING MISSING PEOPLE Members of the Halton Police Board discuss the What3words app, which has helped police in a number of emergency situations. Halton police photo DAVID LEA dlea@metroland.com NEWS