The crash detection feature on iPhones is causing fire and emergency personnel to respond to more than a few false alarms this summer.

Hungry Horse Fire Chief Jared Lako said recently that of the 11 iPhone crash alerts the department has had since Jan. 1, just two have been legitimate.

Still, the department responds to all of the incidents as legitimate emergencies as there have been actual crashes. One problem has been that river guides are putting their phones in the bags and then when the bags get banged around, they’ve been sending out a signal to 911.

In some cases, firefighters have responded to accident calls and the “accident” is a tripped phone in the Middle Fork of the Flathead, far away from any highway.

Columbia Falls Fire Chief Karl Weeks said it’s a countywide problem. Just on Friday he went to a false alarm on Highway 2 in the city.

When he arrived, a man was picking his phone up out of the median of the Highway near Third Avenue East. It had been sitting on the truck and fell.

The man wondered why the fire department had responded. Weeks told him that it was because of the phone alert.

The alert, according to Apple, is only supposed to go off in a “severe” crash.

 But that sometimes means just falling off the dash of a rig.

There have been life-saving calls for sure, though. Weeks said recently a motorist went off the road and into the ditch between Columbia Falls and Whitefish on the back roads. It could have sat there for a very long time before someone saw it, but the phone sent out an alert and the victim was attended to quickly.

Apple notes that the feature does allow for the user to opt out. For one, it can be shut off entirely (though it’s on by default). Secondly, the phone sends out an alert for 10 seconds and if a person is unable to respond, it automatically calls after 30 seconds, so there is a window to stop it

Weeks said the hope is that the technology gets better over time. When he responded to the Highway 2 incident on Friday, it quickly was surmised as a false alarm, as no other calls came in for an accident on what is a very busy  highway this time of year.

Lako agrees the technology is useful, it just needs to be refined.

“When it works, it works great,” he said. “That’s the reason we have to respond.”