Sitting in a meeting several years ago, Douglas (Bud) Weiser and his staff were oblivious to a tornado touching down not too far from their office. Traditional emergency warning systems-outdoor sirens and television and radio broadcasts-weren’t able to reach them.
Yet, according to Weiser, everyone at the table had a pager or cellular phone. That made him wonder why emergency alert systems and wireless technology had never converged.
Weiser’s company, Wm Diedrich Co. of St. Louis, which designs and implements packaging products, has in its charter a clause that calls for the company to spend 10 percent of its operating budget on a community benefit service program. Weiser decided to find out how he could bring this type of technology to his community.
What he found was that nobody was doing it, primarily because it isn’t a revenue-generating venture.
If emergency alert systems aren’t valuable to carriers as a revenue source, maybe they could be useful as a marketing tool, reasoned Weiser. Carriers, many of whom are embroiled in lengthy tower siting moratoria, could use the emergency service system as leverage in getting tower site approvals.
“The zoning board is really caught,” he said. “They can’t deny the tower. The best they can do if the public is really upset is delay it, and all that gets the town is a good lawyer bill.”
He decided to look further into the possibilities and what started as a local public service project turned into a national campaign to bring emergency alerts to digital wireless networks.
While the company was studying the possibilities of bringing emergency alerts to wireless users, a tornado ripped through an Alabama church during an Easter pageant, killing the pastor’s daughter, Hannah Clem. The company decided to adopt her name as the brand for the service-Hannah Watch.
The current system, said Weiser, is a war remnant of civil defense programs designed to warn citizens of air attacks. It evolved into a system to warn communities of local emergencies, most of which were weather related.
In 1994, the Federal Communications Commission revised the old emergency broadcast system into the current Emergency Alert Service, which recognized that warnings were local and information needed to be put into a digital format for easier processing, said Weiser.
Under the current system, an emergency alert is sent to a central broadcaster in one or more of the nation’s 500 predetermined areas. The broadcaster repeats the information to secondary broadcasters in the area, who then relay the information to the public.
Although the government has never tested the effectiveness of the system, Weiser said tests conducted in his community revealed that only about 3 percent of the population is in a position to receive the warnings. However, 32 percent of those surveyed during carried a wireless device.
Under the company’s proposal, wireless carriers would become a secondary broadcaster, receiving the signal from the primary broadcaster and converting it into an alphanumeric or voice message capable of being broadcast to all subscriber handsets in a highly localized area through cell broadcast software.
Foring the C-EAS, the company studied the possibilities, including how it could be done, who the potential vendors were, how much it would cost and how to recover the costs. It found the average cost to deploy the system in a metropolitan area would be around $60,000 to $70,000, including all equipment.
“For $50,000, $60,000, for crying out loud, carriers spend more than that planting petunias around their towers,” said Weiser, who noted that once the system saves lives, carriers would get plenty of news coverage. “My goodness, what kind of press are you going to get the first time your system evacuates a trailer park ahead of tornado?”
A trailer park, he said, like the one destroyed during a tornado that killed 27 people in Jarrell, Texas, earlier this year.
“If you’d have had this system, Jarrell residents would have had 15 minutes notice that this was a level 5 tornado and they needed to evacuate the area,” said Weiser. “We would have saved everybody in Jarrell, Texas.
“One of the most damming pictures of the whole thing was you’ve got this treeless horizon and this humongous storm on it and in the lower left-hand corner is a wireless tower,” continued Weiser.
The company wants to have agreements signed with carriers soon, so that the system can be deployed in time for predicted severe weather resulting from the El Nino phenomenon.
“You’re saving lives,” said Weiser. “The carriers, all the engineers and everybody that put a piece of this together are going to eventually save some family’s life, and there’s just not too many opportunities, that I run into anyway, that you can really do something like that.”
