July 30, 2006
Disaster Technology from China?
Cellphone technology (aka text messaging) could possibly have saved lives during the Katrina disaster?
In a story from "The Book of Joe" weblog:
In this past Wednesday's (July 26) New York Times appeared Jim Yardley's brief story about Typhoon Kaemi, which "came ashore on the southern China coast Tuesday afternoon [July 25], prompting the evacuation of more than 643,000 people in a region still recovering from an earlier storm that caused major flooding."
According to Joe, here's the sentence that blew me away: "State news media reported that officials had sent text-message warnings about the storm to six million cellphone users in the region."
Impressive.
On July 13 the Times ran an article about how the U.S. is planning to institute an updated system for disaster alerts.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that a FEMA official said that doing it the way the Chinese did, via text message to affected cellphone users, "may not be available for some time."
At least FEMA didn't come right out and say, "real soon now."
Read the articles at the Book of Joe weblog