Reverse 911

Yesterday's explosion at the chemical plant reminded me about a technology I read about a few years ago. We were 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. As I watched yesterday's events unfold in real time on kcrag.com, I remembered back to reading about the Reverse 911 system and how useful it might have been. People were posting their concerns on the board. Should they evacuate? Stay home? Run screaming through the streets that the end of time had arrived? (OK I threw that last one in for effect) Rather than rely on media, and emails, and manual phone calls, the following scenario could have taken place. 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 yesterday. 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. (Isn't there always?). 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?