San Diego Fires and Mobile Messaging
by Debi Jones
Some readers at Mobile Messaging 2.0 may be aware that I live in San Diego. Fortunately, I am not there. I’m San Francisco to cover CTIA this week, however, I have received three public service messages from the city of San Diego on my mobile phone today.
The disastrous fires burning in San Diego have initiated a service used by the city and county government to inform and update residents. Mandatory evacuation orders have been communicated via reverse 911 on both landline phones and mobile phones. The messages are prerecorded and as I’ve said, three messages have been received on my phone. The first was an evacuation order. The next message was a notice that San Diego schools are closed until further notice along with the instruction to keep children inside and restrict their activity levels (smoke and ash is so thick in the air that keeping it out of your house is impossible during large fires). The third message was information on evacuation centers that were still open as several are already full.
Regulation in the US for Enhanced 911 or emergency service which incorporates location data has resulted in a number of emergency related services that are unique to the US market when compared to other geographical regions like Western Europe or Asia. The reverse 911 system isn’t specifically a mobile service, but that it does include mobile phones is impressive and to see this system work in the case of a disaster saving time and lives is an important development. To this point, 262,000 households have received reverse 911 calls.
There have also been a flood of messages via Twitter from those located in San Diego and those seeking information on the fire progress and the safety of friends and family.
Advisories have been announced on CNN and local San Diego TV stations asking people to limit their mobile phone use as the networks are saturated. This is a common problem during emergencies as we’ve seen over and over. The one component that continued to provide communication during the London bombings, post Katrina flooding in New Orleans and now in San Diego is text messaging. Twice today my mobile calls have been rejected with the network reporting, “all circuits are busy”. And yet, I’ve continued to be able to send out SMS.
One San Diego resident, Nate Ritter, is using Twitter which I’m receiving on my phone to broadcast updates on evacuation shelter openings and closings once they are full along with updates on the spreading of the fires. Five Hundred homes lost, so far. I learned on Twitter that an additional 50 K people have been evacuated in San Diego today bringing the total to 300 K.
The most up to date information, persistent personal communication capability and official notifications from the government’s emergency services have been delivered to my mobile phone. This is one more demonstration of how critical mobile communications have become not merely for entertainment and trivial time wasting, but as a critical and always-on resource when such capability can literally save lives.
