Your Survival Blog
Tuesday, January 12, 2010
Don’t call us, we’ll call you: emergency notification systems
I was paging through a local newspaper when I spotted a story on something called “Reverse 911”. (Though it’s “000” in Australia, “999” in the UK, and “112” in the European Union, “911” is usually the number dialed to reach emergency services in the US and Canada. Now ... reverse that.) In my years obsessing about preparedness and consuming articles on emergency services and disaster recovery, I hadn’t yet encountered the term.
I mentioned it to a group of friends online. “What is it?” asked one. “In an emergency,” I said, trying to summarize the article as concisely as possible, ”they call you.” “Neat,” she said.
Out of twenty-five in the group, only two had encountered “reverse 911” services in their communities. One, in suburban New York, had been called about a minor water issue. Another, in Massachusetts, joked: “The recorded voice of the chief of police has called us a couple times about irreievant road closures. What are they going to do? Call about a real emergency? It’d cause mass panic.”
“REVERSE 911”, it turns out, is a name trademarked (by Sigma Communications , now part of PlantCML) for what is more properly called an “emergency notification system.” In the same way people say “Kleenex” when they mean facial tissues and “Xerox” when they mean “photocopy”, reporters in towns all over North America have taken to referring to any community notification system as “Reverse 911”. Such systems use recorded calls or other modalities to alert citizens in a geographic area (to blizzards, wildfires, tornadoes, floods, nuclear plant crises, whatever potential disaster looms. Some communities use it to tell citizens of sexual predators in their area, or children who’ve gone missing. Others use it to inform people of contamination in water supplies, or, as my Massachusetts friend learned, road closures.
And so through the night went his cry of alarm / To every Middlesex village and farm ...
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Paul Revere’s Ride”
Here are a few answers for questions you might have:
Q: If “Reverse 911” is a trademark, what are some of the other systems called?
A: In one browsing session I ran across systems made by firms including Everbridge, Amerilert, Enera (RapidReach), Emergency Communications Network (CodeRED), Siemens (Sygnal), Cooper Notification (RSAN), TechRadium (IRIS), Database Systems Corp., and Amtelco (Red Alert), among others. There are probably dozens of firms and packages altogether.
Q: Who can use them?
A: Public-safety officials in any jurisdiction, including police departments, fire departments and other authorities.
Q: How many cities/towns are they deployed in?
A: Now this is an excellent question! The officially trademarked “Reverse 911” system alone claims to be used in “thousands of communities, counties, commercial businesses, schools and non-profit organizations.” So there are probably tens of thousands using all packages on the market, though it’s not clear how many users are towns and counties rather than companies or organizations. Soon Connecticut will roll out the first statewide emergency notification system in the United States.
Q: How do they notify people?
A: Most systems seem to begin with all listed landlines (both residential and business) in a given area. Some (which draw on 911 databases) have unpublished/unlisted numbers as well; others, like Tampa (Florida)’s, apparently do not. The system in Osceola, Arkansas, has both landlines and cell phones in its database. Other systems can use text messages, email, and fax. However, many systems seem to require registration of cell numbers, VoIP (voice over IP) numbers and email addresses.
Q: How much do they cost?
A: A chief of police told The Morning News of Northwest Arkansas that six providers he spoke with all quoted a range of $15K to $25K (US) a year; his community, Bella Vista, has about twenty thousand people. Darien, Connecticut, with about the same population, pays $10K a year to maintain its system. San Diego County (California) paid $200K for its newest system in 2007, and $19K/year to maintain it thereafter. Connecticut’s statewide system should cost $1.4 million/year during its first year, $650K thereafter.
Some towns in the US appear to be defraying costs with grants from the Department of Homeland Security.
Q: Are they used outside the US?
A: Definitely! Systems are in use in Lancashire in the UK, British Columbia in Canada, and Canadian towns and counties in Ontario and New Brunswick, among others.
The state of Victoria, Australia, tested a warning system (both phone- and text-based) in fire-prone areas back in 2005, but it was never rolled out thanks to debate about who would pay the cost, estimated to be $20 million (Australian). In the wake of the devastating fires in Victoria in February of 2009, politicians are now pushing for a national notification system to go live within the next year or so.
Q: Is anyone attempting to standardize these systems?
A: Yes. The "http://www.incident.com/cookbook/index.php/CAP_Fact_Sheet">Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) was adopted as a standard by the International Telecommunications Union in 2007, but it’s not clear how many emergency notification systems are actually using CAP in their software yet.
Notification systems are a still fledgling tool for emergency preparedness, but look amazingly useful. We’ll cover them again as further developments arise.
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