Broadcast Writer

By Vicki W. Kipp

SBE Chapter 24 Newsletter

December 1, 2004

Would you like to receive emergency notifications on your wireless telephone, digital pager, e-mail inbox, Blackberry, fax machine, or any device equipped with an e-mail reception?

A free public service provided by The Emergency Email & Wireless Network makes this possible (see figure 1). Their mission is to “Provide notification to citizens of local, regional, national and international emergencies utilizing the Internet and electronic mail (email) in a secure and expedient manner.”

To sign up for this service, go to http://www.emergencyemail.org, http://www.emergencye.com, or http://www.emergencyemailnetwork.com. Find your state on the leftmost “Sign Up Here” column. Click on your county in the leftmost column. You will need to enter the email address at which you wish to receive emergency notifications, your home county, zip code, and time zone.

You can select which types of notifications you wish to receive from among “severe weather information” (non-emergency), “Homeland Security Code,” “Cyber threats to your computer” (limited time free trial), “Organ Donation,” “Daily Weather Forecasts” (if available), “Routine Blood Drive/ Red Cross,” and “Missing Children Amber Alerts” (as available). You can also elect not to receive National Disaster News. People who get charged for incoming text messages may want to be more selective about which messages they accept.

Some of the messages offered through this service are not distributed via all the sources we traditionally monitor for emergency messages. Having signed up to be notified about non-emergency severe weather information, I recently received a “dense fog advisory,” issued by the National Weather Service, on my wireless device.

The Emergency Email & Wireless Network offers notification of K-12 school closings. However, no schools in Wisconsin are currently signed up to provide notification through this service.

As we know, there is no such thing as a free lunch. On the sign-up web page, there is an option which says, “Keep this service FREE. I agree to receive info from our sponsors WHO make it possible.” A few of the sponsors are listed on the Emergency Email & Wireless Network web site. Incidentally, the Emergency Email & Wireless Network offers a separate commercial service to private companies where they provide corporate message distribution as designated by that company.

When signing up, you can elect to block all non-emergency emails during certain hours of the day, and specify a range of hours. To complete the sign up process, click on the gray “Add” button.

If you wish to change your preferences later or to unsubscribe, go to the web site. Click on the “Update – Unsubscribe” menu near the top of the page. After entering your email address and zip code and clicking on “Update Profile” you can unselect options or unsubscribe.

Agency participation to provide notifications to The Emergency Email & Wireless Network is voluntary. City, county, federal, and civil defense agencies, as well as Red Cross chapters and blood centers, and K-12 schools can sign up to send emergency notifications on the Emergency Email Network at http://www.emergencyemail.org/ 911message.htm. Localities are charged for the ability to disseminate their notifications through the Emergency Email & Wireless Network. Notification sources can send notifications through the service’s web-based sending interface.

While my favorite source of emergency information is my local broadcast station, getting a text alert on my wireless device can be handy at times. 

Figure 1. Email notifications on a nontraditional platform.