Project Lifesaver, a free service meant to keep track of at-risk individuals in the Greenville area, is being discontinued.
The service included a device that allowed at-risk individuals, such as those with autism, dementia, and Alzheimer’s, to be tracked so they wouldn’t go missing if they wandered off.
However, a mix of several reasons has led to the service being discontinued, due to a mix of lack of participation versus the cost to upgrade the program’s technology to the modern age.
Fire Marshal Tristan Johnson with the Greenville City Fire Department said upgrading the fire department’s equipment would have been too expensive, and that the Greenville Sheriff’s Office ran into their own issues when attempting to take over the program with their own equipment.
“So the Sheriff’s Office said ‘hey, listen, we want to do this program as well. We’ll do the new technology, and then maybe we’ll bring your folks on board and maybe we can just transition them all over’,” Johnson said. “Well in the interim, project lifesaver’s new technology never really came to fruition, so the Sheriff’s Office pretty much abandoned that cause.”
This decision was compounded by already existing tracking technologies, such as the more reliable, effective, and pinpoint tracking of smartphones through location finder apps.
Johnson explained that the current Project Lifesaver technology was more than seven years old. He said search teams would only be notified by the trackers if they were within 100 yards of the individual they were searching for but not where within that range the individual actually was.
Additionally, Johnson explained that, even at its height, the program lacked substantial participation from the community. He said the Fire Department advertised the program regularly around the area, but the most concurrent participants at any one time in the program has only been five.
