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The recent explosion and fire at the chemical plant in the East Bottoms
reminded me about a technology I read about a few years ago. I was looking
at ways in our neighborhood to use phone trees or even an auto-dialer system
to alert neighbors about meetings, trash pickup delays, etc.
During my research I stumbled on the concept of Reverse 911. Simply put,
it's a system that lets the authorities call you in the event of an emergency.
A home’s phone will ring just as it would for any other call except there would
be a recorded message giving information on the emergency and steps you should
take. That message could be to evacuate, be on the lookout for a missing child,
or even to lock your windows and doors to guard against a dangerous fugitive.
A second "all clear" call would come when the emergency was over.
In the case of the chemical plant explosion, the following scenario could have
taken place. Rather than rely on media, and emails, and manual phone calls, the
situation commander at the scene calls the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) and
an emergency plan is set in motion. So far, that's exactly how things happened.
If we had a Reverse 911 system, the EOC could also have prepared a quick recorded
message, drew a radius over a map on a computer screen and automated phone calls
would have begun racing out to every phone number in that radius.
It's not a perfect system. Cell phones for one are not tied to a geographic
location. Of course that could be solved by voluntary subscriptions through the
City's website. I for one wouldn't mind my cell phone ringing if I needed to
evacuate or be on the lookout for a lost child.
Then of course there's the issue of cost. Systems can cost upwards of $90,000.
Maintenance would probably be $15-20K/yr too. Not cheap, but not a bank breaker
either. Every couple of years a municipality manages to grab a federal homeland
security grant for one of these systems so there's always that option. Maybe a
good first project for that full-time grant-writer I've been advocating for?
I'm not saying I absolutely want to deploy a Reverse 911 system for Kansas City,
but if it's feasible, and it saves lives, wouldn't it at least be worth investigating?
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