New Zealand civil defence group adopts text updates

By on January 12, 2008 in News

Link: Scoop: Bells and Whistles: Texting Given Emergency Duty

It’s free and it may even save your life.

The power of texting is being harnessed to help give Taranaki people warning of impending Civil Defence emergencies.

Free text alerts from the Taranaki Civil Defence Emergency Management Group will be broadcast as necessary to all those who subscribe to the service. Subscription is free no matter whether cellphone users are with Telecom or Vodafone.

Excellent, excellent. I’d like to see more and more organisations adopting text messaging as a medium for updating concerned parties.

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  • Simon Wilcox

    It’s a nice idea but I still worry about the potential for lost/delayed messages in critical situations. It’s no substitute for big sirens although if enough people sign up I guess the hope is that the people who receive the messages will alert those who don’t.

    S.

  • Mike

    Living under/next to active volcanoes does focus the mind on these sorts of things!

  • Simon Wilcox

    Heh, very true and for a mass broadcast system it’s probably safe enough but as the 9/11 experience, not to mention every New Year’s eve shows, sudden mass texting can cause serious network degradation.

    I guess my real concern would be in relying on SMS for single message alerting. There is no guarantee that the message will be delivered on time or indeed at all. We get very complacent with expecting messages to be delivered instantly but no-one should rely on it for anything critical. It’s just not reliable enough !

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