The chatter this week....after the storm business, is that the government (mostly a federal project) will hand down in the summer of 2022 a program that will enable a town to send out SMS messages to everyone in the town/village to warn of a urgent weather front that threatens the lives of people in the town/village.
The technology? Well...the technology has been out there for a decade or more....at least in the US.
Why it takes one entire year? That's not explained in detail. I suspect that making the 'funnel' for each village, deciding who authorizes the message, and who pushes the button....probably is the bulk of the problem.
I sat there pondering over this. I live in a valley that is about 5 minutes driving from the city limits of Wiesbaden. A hefty hill separates the village from the city.
How many weather events do we have each year that fit into this profile? I'd say one event where mild flooding (to your ankles, at least out on the street) and probably six to eight where they suspect something bad is coming, but it never materializes to that degree.
The chief issue though....if you sent out a weather-warning SMS at 1 AM.....would I even react to it? Would I have the smart-phone on the bedside table? Would it be like those three evenings a month where I'm down to 2-percent 'juice' left on the battery at 8 PM and just forget to charge up the phone?
Wouldn't it be better to have some special 'siren' sound installed into the smart-phone, and just activate like some WW II alert that the British bombers are coming?
The odds in a village of 4,000 people....that the alert comes on at 3 AM, and suddenly the 'shock' occurs, with four old geezers having heart attacks because of the amount of fear over the warning?
For some reason, I just don't see this SMS thing having that much success.
2 comments:
Here in Ontario we have an Amber alert, it is sent to all cell phones in the area affected, just recently a tornado hit a neighbourhood in the Barrie area 100 km North if Toronto, sadly the Amber alert went out only a few minutes before the tornado hit, but i git regular alert from The Weather Network application hours prior that a large front is coming but it was not specific about where it would hit.
I was back in the states a few years ago....first morning, out of a hotel and walked next door to Wal-Mart to pick up something. Dark clouds, and 3 minutes into Wal-Mart....this alert comes to my cellphone (tornado within 3 miles). Phone was a European model, and I wasn't signed up for any service locally. Kinda shocked how the network saw me, and gave me an alert...but it worked as it was designed. My issue....99.99-percent of all storms in Germany are non-tornado type, and the micro-burst situations are one single storm out of a thousand. By the time, you get the micro-burst notice, you might only have fifteen minutes to react.
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