There is already a SMS type system in place for sending out alerts to cell phones. It's called the WEA (Wireless Emergency Alert) system.

In addition to the WEA, a lot of emergency services have their own Twitter feeds that you can have forwarded to you cell. Text the following to 40404 for the San Diego region.

Emergency Twitter feeds

San Diego county emergency: follow readysandiego

Calfire San Diego: follow calfiresandiego

San Diego Imperial County Red Cross: follow sdicredcross

Fema region 9 : follow femaregion9

Is there an issue with adds on Twitter soaking up bandwidth? I'd rather be able to send a generic text message to a responder, emergency center, rather than need to "follow". What am I missing?

BTW: that Maratac watch I mentioned earlier lost 4 seconds over a day -- not bad for an auto-winder. Really, I wonder if @pple will ever advertise the accuracy of an iWatch when off-line. Rhetorical Q...

It's text only. No reply and no adds. This was the last message I received from the Twitter feed.



The main advantage is that it gives you a low bandwidth link to the emergency services announcements. It's second only to radio in reliability, but doesn't require constant monitoring.

Most of the time, I only have the local Emergency Management Agency feed turned on (readysandiego). Because there's currently a red flag fire warning in effect, I also have the CalFire feed turned on as well.

I have never considered Twitter because it seemed gimmicky. But now I may need to reconsider.

Dumb question: Can you post to a Twitter feed or is it receive only? Never mind, "No reply"...
So how would you Tweet out? How would that side of the communication work?

You can post via SMS

https://support.twitter.com/groups/54-mo...ia-text-message

Or, you can send an SMS to multiple phones and emails. Just like and old school list serve group. Just be sure that you're cell number is also on the send to list so you can track time-to-delivery.

Or, there is the out-of-town-emergency contact to handle it.

Okay... what does Twitter add. If I'm sending an SMS what is gained by going through Twitter? When I send a text message to friends in my phones contact list, I just send them a message, no account sign-up, very simple. Twitter seems to be an unnecessary middle-man. What does Twitter add to the communication system?

After visiting the sd county emergency website, the reason to use Twitter is that's what they use. However, if you want to send info to them, call 911 or 211 depending. It appears they don't take text messages either.

In a few places yes, but in most areas you cannot presently send text to 911. See What You Need to Know About Text-to-911 . In the future it will likely become available in most areas.

Some PSAPs (Public Safety Answering Points, AKA 911 centers) accept text messages. Right now there is a federal mandate requiring the carriers to be able to send text messages to PSAPs that request them, but no mandate for PSAPs to do so. Take a look at http://www.fcc.gov/text-to-911 to see more information.

That is the same link I added above.

Note that if you send a text to a PSAP that does not accept text message, they are required to give you a bounce back message.


Note that the FCC page includes a link to a spread sheet showing which PSAPs currently accept text messages. Seems to be quite a few in TX and IN, and quite a few scattered around in a number of other states.