At 6:50 p.m. on Tuesday, June 14th a magnitude 7.2 earthquake occured in the deep sea 90 miles off the coast of northern California. Shortly thereafter, the West Coast and Alaska Tsunami Warning Center issued a Tsunami warning to all residents of coastal California. An hour later, to everyone's relief, the warning was rescinded, as no Tsunami occurred.
Unfortunately, most people knew nothing of the warning until after it was canceled. That's a problem.
On that pleasant summer evening days ago, many people were away from their TVs and radios, and those that heard the few sirens that sounded were simply puzzled. A Tsunami, had one originated so close to the coast, would have innundated many areas witin the hour, before any significant reaction by residents. Despite the ubiquitous distribution of text-message-capable cell phones, there is no coordinated method for distributing a Tsunami warning to individuals in California. In fact, there isn't a way to notifify individuals anywhere in the U.S. of any natural disaster. There are only news media broadcasts and disaster sirens.
A better way to inform the public is through personal alerts delivered by cell phone. Alas, getting the government to instantiate a personal disaster warning system would be a massive undertaking. But there isn't any reason the public can't take matters into its own hands: A grass-roots warning system could be launched just like any other open-source project, and be up and running before the government finished the feasibility study on its own system.
As network administrators, we already have the requisite personal notification mechanisms in place. The network management systems we currently employ to montitor networks have the ability to send pages, make phone calls, and deliver faxes. These systems are battle-tested and generally reliable. They're an excellent way to deliver disaster alerts.
Personal disaster alerts need not reach every individual directly to be effective. If one person in a building gets an alert, he or she can readily notify others nearby, shortening reaction time to the impending disaster. A good model for such a system is the existing NOAA Specific Area Message Encoder (SAME) Emergency Alert System, a radio-based nationwide broadcast system that encodes textual disaster alert messages along with location information to trigger alarms on individual NOAA radio receivers. You can buy these receivers for under $50 and program them to alert you to disasters in your area. An example of such a device is the Midland 74-250C weather radio.
The first step in a personal disaster notification system is marrying NOAA's EAS with our existing NMSs. Once we can receive localized disaster information, we can disseminate it to selected individual cell phones, pagers, and fax machines in realtime. EAS supports two radio notification systems: One using terrestrial FM transmitters, and another using satellite broadcasts. The satellite system, called Emergency Managers Weather Information Network (EMWIN), supports direct-to-computer interfaces. An EMWIN earth station consists of an EMWIN reciever and a three-foot satellite dish antenna. Commercial EMWIN stations cost between $1,000 and $2,000. You can purchase EMWIN hardware and software from Skywalker, Skywatch, Tigertronics, and Zephyrus.
An alternative to an expensive direct radio interface is extracting alerts from NOAA's disaster Web site. Alas, NOAA does not seem to have a single Web point of contact for alert information. Each kind of alert -- earthquake, fire, Tsunami, severe weather, fire -- appears to have its own NOAA page. An experimental XML message service for Tsunamis is at http://wcatwc.arh.noaa.gov/message.shtml. We should lobby NOAA to deliver event messages through a single, well-defined XML-based Web Services interface.
If you know of an existing EMWIN NMS interface, or have ideas on how to construct one, post your ideas here. If enough interest develops, I'll create a Web site dedicated to the grass-roots disaster network concept.
