Canadian Shootings - SMS alerts used anywhere?
Like most people, I’ve been following the horror of the recent Canadian College shootings (Bloomberg article).
I place myself in the situation and can’t quite comprehend what I’d do if I was sat in class and heard gunshots getting louder and louder. I read about some teachers and students barricading them inside their rooms — which, to me, sounds like an eminently sensible approach.
My mind then moved naturally to where we’d get our information from as we’re sat in the class listening to screaming, sirens, shouts and gunfire. You couldn’t exactly call the college’s main telephone line to ask for a status update - I’d imagine you’d have thousands of students trying to get through to the one number. Although I also read that the college had provided a recorded message statement to press.
I wonder if that college has or was planning to implement an SMS text alerts system such as the one provided by Omnilert? The college, much like many others in Canada I’m sure, has 7,000 day and 3,000 night students — all carrying mobile phones. Managing information flow to these students teachers and support staff during an event such as a shooting must be quite a critical requirement.
I’m certainly no disaster management expert though.
I’d like to see every educational institution - colleges, universities, high schools — implementing a near real time information service via text for all their stakeholders (students, teachers, support staff and of course, parents).
I’m no disaster management guru either but the concept of using mobile/sms as a way of providing personalised and localised communication (in both directions) during disasters seems theoretically brilliant.
However I fear that (certainly in this country, I don’t know about Canada/others) the infrastructure simply isn’t good enough to cope in extreme circumstances.
On 7/7 there were major network problems which, depending on who you listen to were, because of lack of capacity, or because the networks actually disabled them for public use so that emergency workers could get priority calls through; or was it a combination of both? Either way it seems that the networks and government are missing a massive trick here in being able to provide the kind of emergency scenario communication that we need in this modern and sometimes scary world. And when most warfare tacticians know that knocking out communications is the initial objective in a conflict, it seems that if anyone wants to hit the UK then they needn’t worry about us having a modern failsafe mobile communication system.
cheers
Posted by steve procter on September 15th, 2006 at 12:31 pm.steve/itagg