The work order has an address. The crew is three hundred metres behind it.

Dispatch knows an address. Nobody knows a location.

Utility work is organised by circuit, pole number and work order, and every one of those is a description of an asset rather than a place a person can be found. The gap between the two is where the safety problem lives.

A rear-lot span is reached through a back yard or a two-track and is invisible from the street. A right-of-way runs behind a subdivision with the nearest driveway two streets away. A meter pit, a vault or a substation yard is a place somebody walks into alone and out of again, and the only record that it happened is a completed work order.

So when the question becomes urgent — where is he, exactly, right now — the honest answer from most contractors is the last address he was dispatched to and roughly what time. Emergency responders cannot work with the third pole behind 412 Elm, and neither can the foreman who is already driving.

How a three-person crew ends up alone

These crews are small enough that everybody knows where everybody is, right up until they do not.

• A tree crew works one span, then moves to the next, all day. By mid-afternoon the crew is a kilometre from where the truck started and nobody updated anything.
• Aloft work separates people vertically as well as horizontally. A climber or a bucket operator is up, the groundman is at the chipper, and if it is the groundman who is hurt the person best placed to call is sixty feet in the air.
• Locate and meter techs run twenty to forty solo stops across a county: back yards, dogs, crawl spaces, pits. Every stop is a lone-worker event, and the last one of the day is the one after which nobody is expecting to hear from them.
• Storm restoration puts everybody out overnight in territory they do not know, with mutual-aid crews from other states, congested networks and sixteen-hour shifts. The normal ways a crew keeps track of itself all degrade at once.
• Subcontracting adds a second layer: the utility knows which contractor is on a circuit, the contractor knows which crew, and the crew foreman is the only person who knows which of his people walked into the easement ten minutes ago.
• The most common failure is not dramatic. It is that "call me when you're clear" depends on the person being able to call, which is exactly the condition that fails.

What STALKR actually does on a crew

Each of these is in the current iOS beta, and each is described as it behaves rather than as a promise.

• The crew joins one Crew by entering a code and asking; an owner or admin approves. A foreman running two crews keeps them as two Crews, and switching the active Crew switches the whole map with it.
• Live Crew sharing puts each person's current position, facing direction, accuracy, status and battery on the map while they are sharing — so what the map shows is a person, not a vehicle parked at the nearest address.
• Presence is labelled live, stale, or unknown, with the time of the last update. A position that has aged is marked aged rather than drawn as though it were current.
• Crew member trails draw where somebody has recently been from the positions their device already published. A gap in the line is a gap in what was shared, never proof that nobody moved.
• Check-in timers and a repeating dead-man switch for the solo tech and for anybody entering a yard, a vault or an easement alone. A missed acknowledgement escalates by push notification and email to the Crew and to the recipients selected, carrying the last known location and the time.
• Zones — circles or polygons — around a work area, a drop zone or an exclusion, alerting on Enter and Leave transitions. Zones report the crossing, not how long somebody stayed.
• Markers for what is actually on the ground: the locked gate, the access track that takes a bucket truck, a hazard, a staging point. Photos attach to a Marker, which turns a description into a picture with a coordinate.
• SOS is a press-and-hold action that creates a panic incident, attempts to alert the active Crew, and opens a pre-filled message the sender sends themselves.
• Tracks record where a person actually travelled during a shift, as personal history rather than a supervisor report.

Why a crew will not read it as a timeclock

Field crews are right to be wary of a location app that shows up on the safety agenda, because most of them are workforce monitoring wearing a safety label. A tool the crew quietly leaves switched off protects nobody, so the distinction has to be structural rather than a promise in a policy.

• Sharing is scoped to a Crew. What the work Crew sees is not visible to any other Crew, and there is no account-wide view that collects a person's movements across all of them.
• Live and Dark are chosen per Crew. At the end of a shift a member goes Dark in the work Crew, and nothing new is published to it.
• Approximate location can represent a position as an area rather than a point. It lowers precision — it is not anonymity, and authorised viewers still receive an area.
• Publishing a location takes a deliberate consent step. Installing the app shares nothing on its own.
• There is no supervisor dashboard, no timesheet, no productivity metric and no workforce administration surface. There is a map that members of a Crew can see, and that is the whole of it.
• Tracking Enforced exists as a Pro Crew rule an owner can turn on, and it keeps every member of that Crew Live — the owner included — until the owner turns it off. It is a decision to announce, not to spring on people, and it cannot manufacture a position: with location permission denied there is nothing to publish, and anybody can leave the Crew.

What it does not do, in the terms a safety manager uses

If this is being evaluated against a written lone-worker procedure, these are the gaps. They are absences in the product, not features behind a paywall.

• No man-down or fall detection. A fall from height, a strike, an electrical contact or a rollover raises nothing on its own. An alert happens because somebody pressed SOS or missed a check-in they armed.
• No monitored response. There is no 24/7 centre, no operator and no dispatch. Alerts go to your own Crew and to the recipients that worker selected, by push notification and email — never by SMS, and never to emergency services. Somebody still has to call 911.
• No supervisor or web dashboard. A foreman or a safety lead sees the crew by being in the Crew on an iPhone. A Journey watch link is the only surface that opens in a browser, and it covers one trip shared with its chosen watchers.
• No recurring scheduled check-ins. Timers are armed by hand by the person they cover; nothing pushes a check-in schedule out to a crew or enforces one.
• No configurable escalation policies, tiers or on-call rotations. The recipient list is chosen by the worker, and escalation stops there.
• No compliance export, incident reporting or audit record. Nothing here produces documentation for a utility client, a regulator or an insurer, and STALKR carries no certification against any lone-worker standard.
• No enterprise provisioning, SSO or workforce administration. Every person signs up individually and joins a Crew by code.
• iOS TestFlight only. There is no public App Store release and no Android release, so a crew issued Android handsets cannot use it today.
• Background location is implemented and OS-controlled, and physical-device validation remains an open release gate. Force-quitting stops ordinary background work, and background execution on iOS is never guaranteed.
• Positions and alerts need a data connection. There are no downloadable offline maps, no offline-first sync and no satellite transport, so in a dead spot or a congested storm network positions age to stale and escalation waits for service.
• Arrival and overdue alerts depend on scheduled server functions and push delivery, so they are neither instant nor guaranteed.

Against a lone-worker requirement

The rows a contractor is usually asked to answer, and what STALKR can honestly claim on each. Half of them are absences, so the second column says what it takes to cover the row instead — a dash means STALKR covers it and nothing further is needed.

Related NAVTRL Systems