posted 7 years ago
Most nights I put my phone on silent, so that I can sleep as soundly as possible when I do not want to receive any call outs from work, so I don't know how I would get an alert even though my smarty pants phone is right beside me on my bedstand, charging and doing it's job as my alarm clock.
There was a big kerfuffa on the C.B.C. radio this morning because of the same incident that R Ranson started this post about. The local radio broadcast show spans my highway from the coastal communities of Haida Gwaii and Prince Rupert, inland to the Rockies where I am and then up into the North East of the province. On Haida Gwaii (an archipelago of islands off B.C.'s North Coast), according to the story, tsunami sirens go off, and the police go down the road with a loudspeaker, and knock on all doors. Everyone is evacuated to high ground. The population of Haida Gwaii is small and so this task can be done relatively quickly. In Prince Rupert, a much larger community, most people slept through the text message reminder. That's where the story dwelled while I was driving my welding truck this morning, but I got out of radio range pretty quick heading out to my work site, so I lost the rest of the story.
At any rate, I think that, if enough people raise a stink, that something on the lines of what Kyle wrote might be implemented. It's definitely worth raising a stink about. That kind of shit make me mad.
I think Mike J's idea about the elderly not having smart phones and being some of the most vulnerable, and them not being alerted. A good story for the news service.
Slightly off topic, but this reminds me of a time I was co-parenting a young girl in Vancouver in 2006. We moved from the city of New Westminister, to Vancouver and enrolled her in a new school. The school asked us for our cell phone numbers, in case of an emergency. Neither of us had a cell phone. We had a land line, which was quite sufficient for our needs. We were running the house basically on my income as a support worker and some bursery's/grants for the mother's schooling. We had a tight budget. The mother was in school all day, and we gave the girl's school the number of her mother's school; I thought that was perfectly adequate. I worked evenings, and so I gave them that number as well, even though the daughter would be out of school by the time I started. But they were insistent that we have a cell phone, and that this was a school policy, in case they needed to get a hold of us, personally in the event of an emergency. I told them basically this: "Your policy is ridiculous", and asked them "What the hell you did for the past 100 years before cell phones existed? The child is in their care from the moment that bell rings in the morning until the dismissal bell rings, period, full stop, end of story. If there is an emergency, deal with it. There's principals, teachers, councilors, nurses, doctors, police, whatever. Deal with it, and we will deal with it when we find out about it. Pretty simple. If you feel the need to pursue insisting on this, then you can pay for a cell phone for me." I hung up the phone. The never called again about it.
"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it's the only thing that ever has."-Margaret Mead "The only thing worse than being blind, is having sight but no vision."-Helen Keller