Like many of you, I've watched the recent events in Japan with horror and much sadness. One of the inevitable side-effects of this has been a critical re-assessment of our family's readiness to meet a similar disaster. The fact is that here in Northern California we're likely to experience a significant earthquake within the next few decades. Until a week ago, I'm pretty sure that my family would have been caught with our pants down.
Its never terribly fun to make preparations for a disaster, because to do so entails reviewing a lot of unpleasant scenarios in detail.
Some aspects of disaster preparation are pretty straightforward. You've got to buy or collect some stuff. Get some water, some first aid supplies, some food and various other bits and bobs, and stash is all somewhere where it'll be accessible after the Big One. Ok, as long as your house doesn't fall down on top of you and everyone you love is together when it hits, you're all set.
However, if you're like us, your whole family is in different locations much of the day, five days a week. The thought that I might be in the my office in Sunnyvale during a major earthquake, and have no way to find out if my family is safe 35 miles away is by far the most terrifying thing I can think of in a disaster scenario.
With that in mind (and with my basic disaster kit in place at home), I set my thoughts to a communication plan. In the past, our family had always had an out-of-state contact identified who we would each call and who would coordinate our communication. There are so many problems with this plan: Everyone has to memorize the person's phone number (I can't even remember who it's supposed to be), the person may not be reachable, the likelihood of being able to make long-distance phone calls is slim, and worst of all, unless you can get through a number of times (unlikely), there's no way to get the complete picture of everyone's status and plans. There has to be a better way.
It turns out that unless every member of your family has a ham radio in their pocket, the most likely mode of communication that will actually work after a disaster is SMS (text messaging) on your cell phone. This is not a sure thing, of course, but it's the best bet.
The ideal solution, I thought, would be an SMS equivalent of an email list. Put your family members on the list, and one SMS text tells everyone your status. No multiple texts or calls, no crossed-signals, no confusion - everyone knows everything in real time. After poking around a little, it turns out that Twitter lets you do exactly this.
The Solution
Twitter has excellent integration with SMS, allowing you post updates via SMS as well as receive SMS updates from streams you subscribe to. The trick is to filter out the tweets that your family might be making in regular life.
Our solution was for each person to create a dedicated twitter account for disaster communication. We chose to use the format "name + 911" for our account names, but anything would work. The next step was to "follow" each others' twitter streams. What you end up with is a network of users who are all following one another on a dedicated emergency channel.
Next, we all registered our cell phones with our twitter accounts, so we could post via SMS. Posting is as simple as sending the content of your tweet as a text message to "40404" (in the US, at least). I've saved the number as a new contact called "Emergency Twitter" for easy recall when needed. Lastly, with our cell phones registered, we were able to set up SMS notifications of new tweets from everyone in our emergency circle.
The result is that anybody in this circle sends a text to "40404", everyone gets it. Once a quake hits, we can all instantly send an SMS to those we love and let them know how we're doing, where we are, and what are plans are. No more confusion, no more anxiety...
The final cool thing about using Twitter for this, is you can choose to create a "list" with the members of your circle in it. All the tweets from the members of this list can be viewable on twitter.com by the public. This means that you can share your list URL in advance with other friends or family outside the disaster area and get them real-time updates on your situation.
Also, your circle can be pretty fluid - it can overlap with other circles with people just getting the SMS updates from those they choose. The key is to have dedicated accounts that are only used for emergencies, and set up SMS notifications for everyone you follow.
I hope this comes in handy for you and the ones you love. Let's all pray that we never need it.
