Blasting Emergency Warnings

The Wall St Journal reports today that state-of-the-art systems can blast mass warnings to cellphones and PCs, Texting When There's Trouble.

With administrators at Virginia Tech facing hard questions about how long it took them to notify students after the first killings in Monday's shooting rampage there, emergency communication is sure to become a pressing issue nationwide.

The ubiquity of relatively new technologies allows electronic alerts to reach more people faster than ever before. In the aftermath of several recent disasters -- including the tsunami in South Asia, Hurricane Katrina on the Gulf Coast, and the terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid -- a growing number of governments, communities, school systems and universities have begun using automated electronic-alert systems that can send voice, email or text messages to residents and students, in addition to traditional broadcast emergency messages. The services mean that people no longer need to be listening to radio, watching TV, logged on to their email or near a home phone to be warned of trouble.

That is precisely what I was speaking of in Why Weren't Students Notified  Colleges, cities and towns should be investigating, choosing and implementing such a system as quickly as possible.    The costs are minimal, the benefits great.