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Chapter One
How Did the World
Become Mobile?
In January 2010 Dan Woolley and David Hames had been
working in Haiti making a film about that country’s extreme
poverty. They had just returned to the Hotel Montana in
the capital city of Port-au-Prince. But then, as Woolley
later told a reporter for
Today
, “I just saw the walls rippling
and just explosive sounds all around me. It all happened
incredibly fast. David yelled out, ‘It’s an earthquake,’ and
we both lunged and everything turned dark.”
4
Woolley’s glasses had flown off his face; he felt lost and
disoriented in the darkness. The one thing he had handy
was an iPhone. He used the phone’s camera and flash to
light up his surroundings. He saw the bottom of an eleva-
tor shaft and decided it would be the safest place to be if
another tremor came. However, Woolley was bleeding pro-
fusely from wounds on his head and leg. He did not know
how badly he had been hurt. He could not call for help
because his phone was not receiving a signal.
Woolley thought about what he had on his phone. He
called up a first aid app. Following its instructions, he used
his shirt and a sock to fashion a tourniquet and bandage
for his leg and a bandage for his head wound. Because the
app warned him that he might go into shock and fall asleep,
he set the phone’s alarm to go off every twenty minutes.
After that all he could do was wait. He spent the time re-
cording voice messages for his wife and sons. Sometimes
he listened to music stored on his phone. When the battery
level dropped to 20 percent, he shut off the phone to save
power. Finally, after sixty-five hours he heard the sounds of
a rescue party breaking through.
