The increased reliance on emergency text alerts to receive warnings of natural or manmade disasters is a capability that most people have come to expect. Listening to broadcast radio warnings of severe weather happening miles away has transformed into more precise, geo-located alerts that target specific locations. The benefits of this technology are profound and should lead to people taking action when an alert comes in because they know that the threat is timely and accurate to their locations. New technologies could save many lives during future disasters.

Notwithstanding human or technological errors that do occur – for example, the erroneous North Korean missile alert in Hawaii or nonstop weather alerts that drive people to disable the alert feature on their phones – these alerts have the ability to save lives in ways not possible only a few years ago. Unfortunately, as powerful as these systems and smartphones are to pinpoint locations or to receive and display alerts specific to nearby life-threatening situations, this capability would fail if there is no “last mile” signal to communicate with handheld hardware.

Lessons Learned From Wildfires in California

As the recent wildfires in California demonstrated, this communication channel is vulnerable to the same disaster it is trying to warn against – everything burns, including cell towers and power lines – and without coverage, lives may be in danger. After fires ravaged California’s wine country in October 2017, Sonoma County Sheriff Rob Giordono noted that “communication problems in general have been difficult,” due to the size and scale of the fire, which ultimately killed more than 40 people and destroyed 3,500 homes and businesses. In Sonoma County, the fires disabled 77 cellphone towers, some due to power failures. Without cell coverage in the immediate area of the fires, emergency alerts could not be delivered to smartphones. Although Giordono noted that residents who registered for county alerts for their landline phones would receive warnings, this assumes that homes have a traditional (and self-powered) twisted copper pair landline connected to a hard-wired telephone. For the increasing number of people who have either discontinued using their landline phones or have moved to an internet phone service such as Vonage or MagicJack, these “landline” alerts would only arrive if these houses still have internet service.

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