BOULDER, Colo.-If Boulder, Colo., had experienced flooding last week, SCC Communications Corp. and U S West Communications Inc. might have been able to help the city notify residents that they needed to evacuate.
But the city had sunny skies last Wednesday when it held its annual Early Warning Evacuation service flood preparedness test. Along with the typical outdoor sirens and emergency broadcast warnings, SCC and U S West demonstrated a new system that can notify residents by phone of impending weather danger. The system, which is not yet commercially available, is capable of dialing as many as 1,200 phone numbers per minute and playing a recorded message warning citizens of impending danger and providing instructions. During last week’s demonstration, SCC said its system attempted to call about 860 residents.
John Sims, chief operating officer of SCC, said initial results of the test indicated about 80 percent of the calls either were completed to a person or an answering machine. The remaining 20 percent were not answered, reached a busy signal or were partially delivered. The company said it believes penetration rates would be even higher at night.
Sims said the system is capable of redialing numbers that initially are not answered or are busy. With GIS mapping capability, the system also could call residents in the most imminent danger first in the cases of weather or other dangerous situations that are moving over a geographic area, said Sims.
While the initial testing was focused on landline phones, the company said the service easily could be applied to wireless devices.
Boulder is especially concerned about flood danger after another Colorado city, Fort Collins, last year experienced severe flooding that killed five people. Bizarre weather this year, including a series of tornadoes in the South that have claimed the lives of more than 100 people, is putting the nation’s current emergency alert capabilities on trial.
Douglas (Bud) Weiser and his organization, the Cellular-Emergency Alert Service Association, a volunteer organization dedicated to establishing emergency notification as a standard feature of digital wireless service, has attracted a lot of attention both within the industry and beyond. A recent PrimeTime Live story featuring Weiser took the industry to task for not moving on the issue more quickly.
Weiser claims the industry is dragging its feet on implementing a system that would save lives. A carrier in the South, he said, even refused an offer of a free platform and money to subsidize the system from emergency management officials. Weiser said he believes carriers are afraid they will be held liable if alerts aren’t delivered properly.
But the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association and the Federal Communications Commission say the issue goes deeper than that.
“We think it’s a really interesting concept that carriers should evaluate and decide if they want to make it available,” said Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for CTIA. Nelson noted that current broadcast alert systems are done on a voluntary basis and the same standard of voluntary compliance should extend to wireless carriers.
Nelson also said CTIA has been working to develop a national standard for emergency alert systems, “but the technology is so new that it is premature to mandate a particular type of system this early in the game.”
Dan Phythyon, chief of the FCC’s Wireless Telecommunications Bureau, said the commission feels it would need to explore the issue further before it would mandate that wireless carriers provide an alert system over their networks. In addition, Phythyon said even if the commission were to mandate it, technology decisions are best left to the marketplace.
For now, the commission is focused on implementing enhanced 911 services that require better information to be delivered to public safety answering points during emergencies. The FCC will continue to examine other public-safety issues, such as wireless emergency alert systems and priority access, said Phythyon.
The technology to provide this type of emergency alert service is available, although one platform developer says the idea is still relatively new. Lexington, Mass.-based Logica Aldiscon’s flagship product is a short message sender that is capable of delivering a message to all wireless handsets in a given cell, said Mark Shiels, vice president of sales for the company.
The company has implemented systems in Malaysia and Lebanon for carriers experimenting with the services. The system is designed to work with Global System for Mobile communications networks, said Shiels. In the United States, specifications for providing the service on Code Division Multiple Access and Time Division Multiple Access networks are not yet completed, he said.
“I think it will be a while before operators are given guidelines on how to implement cell broadcast technology,” said Shiels.
Local emergency management officials have expressed interest in wireless emergency alert systems. Preston Cook, communications and warning coordinator for the Orange County, Fla., Emergency Management division, said the concept is relatively new to them and they are interested in the possibilities it provides.
