While driving back to Pratt from Cimarron along US50--and viewing the damage caused by last Friday's tornado--the wife and I started to talk about the best way to alert folks to bad weather. You see, a lot of people here live on widely spaced farms and many do not have TVs, computers, or land line telephones. So, how do you get the word out to the maximum number of people? What we came up with is that you can use electronic postcards.
A surprising number of people have cell phones, even people who don't use a lot of technology. But calling all the cell phone numbers in the affected area won't work very well since some users will be on travel while a number of visitors to the area will be missed. What would be nice is if you could send a message to every cellular device that connected to a given tower regardless of carrier or phone number--similar, in effect, to a UDP message sent to all devices attached to a given network.
We have absolutely no idea whether the current technology or protocols allow for a tower-wide distribution of messages. If it does then the system could map out which towers cover the area affected by the storm or disaster and then send out a general alert to all devices, probably in the form of both voice and text messages.
You will still miss some people, but the number of people who get the message should be a considerable increase over current methods.
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