Weather alerts coming soon to smartphone near you

MINNEAPOLIS – Millions of smartphone users will soon begin receiving text messages about severe weather from a sophisticated government system that can send a blanket warning to mobile devices in the path of a dangerous storm.

Jim Mone, AP

Bob Burns holds his smartphone Wednesday, June 27, 2012 in Minnetonka, Minn.

Jim Mone, AP

Bob Burns holds his smartphone Wednesday, June 27, 2012 in Minnetonka, Minn.

The new Wireless Emergency Alerts system gives the National Weather Service a new way to warn Americans about menacing weather, even if they are nowhere near a television, radio or storm sirens.

Beginning Thursday, the system will notify people about approaching tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards and other threats. When a warning is issued for a specific county, a message of no more than 90 characters will cause late-model smartphones in that area to sound a special tone and vibrate.

Users do not have to sign up for the service or pay for the text message. And people who prefer not to get the warnings can opt out of the system.

"These alerts will make sure people are aware of any impending danger and provide them with the information needed so they can be safe until the threat is over," said Amy Storey, spokeswoman for CTIA-The Wireless Association, an industry trade group that helped set up the system.

The system does not yet work with all smartphones or in all areas. It is part of a broader alert network the Federal Emergency Management Agency launched in April that can also send public-safety warnings from the president and participating state and local governments. But the weather service estimates that more than 90% of the messages will be about storms.

The weather warnings will include tornadoes, hurricanes, typhoons, tsunamis, flash floods, extreme winds, blizzards and ice and dust storms. Designers were concerned about overloading users with too much information, so they deliberately limited the messages to warnings, not watches, and excluded severe thunderstorm warnings, weather service spokeswoman Susan Buchanan said.

Wireless carriers serving almost 97% of U.S. subscribers have agreed to participate, including the biggest nationwide companies — AT&T Inc., Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel Corp. and T-Mobile USA. Each of the four offers at least some phones capable of receiving emergency alerts, with more on the way.

Sprint, Verizon and T-Mobile say they offer the service nationwide. AT&T only offers it in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Portland, Ore., at the moment. Spokesman Michael Balmoris said the company will add additional markets over time but declined to say which ones or when.

Government officials don't have a good handle on exactly how many capable devices are already in use, but Damon Penn, assistant administrator for national continuity programs at FEMA, said the number is probably in the millions.

He said smartphone users should check with their carriers to find out whether service is available and if their device is able to use it. He said many people own phones equipped to get the new alerts but don't know it yet.

Sprint spokeswoman Crystal Davis said most Sprint smartphones now in use can receive the alerts thanks to recent automatic software upgrades. All new models will be equipped, as will all new tablet devices.

One unanswered question is when the legions of Apple iPhone users will be able to receive alerts. Buchanan said iPhones are supposed to join the system in the fall, but she didn't know if that means only new iPhones, or if software upgrades will make older models capable, too. Representatives of Apple Inc., which is highly secretive about its product upgrades, did not respond to several messages seeking details.

FEMA's system carries three kinds of alerts: presidential alerts, which might deal with national security information such as terrorist attacks; imminent-threat alerts, which include weather warnings as well as public-safety messages from local authorities; and Amber Alerts issued by law enforcement agencies for kidnapped children.

Phone users can opt out of the imminent threat and Amber Alerts, usually just by changing their settings, but they can't opt out of presidential alerts.

Twenty-eight state or local emergency management agencies in about a dozen states are authorized to send imminent-threat alerts. Eighty-three others are in the process of getting certified.

Agencies have different ideas for the system. Minnesota is considering using it for chemical spills or nuclear accidents. In southern Florida's Miami-Dade County, it might convey hurricane evacuation information.

Curt Sommerhoff, Miami-Dade's director of emergency management, said the alerts will permit authorities to distribute urgent information to people in danger "whether you're a resident, employee or visitor."

On the streets of downtown Minneapolis, a couple of smartphone users were open to receiving the unsolicited weather and other warnings.

"I spend enough time reading junk on my phone that's of no real benefit to me. I might as well read something useful," said Bob Burns, a Minnetonka attorney sitting at a sidewalk cafe as he worked on both an iPhone and an iPad. "It's putting technology to use for the public good."

Dan Smith, a photographer from Reston, Va., who was in Minneapolis for a convention, said he was worried that the messages could became intrusive.

"It's like email. It used to be you only got stuff you wanted. Now you get 20 junk messages for every good one," Smith said.

The system doesn't use the satellite-based global positioning system to determine a phone's location. Participating carriers just send an alert out from every cell tower in the affected county, and capable smartphones pick it up.

So if a user from Minneapolis travels to Kansas City, Mo., that person would get local warnings for Kansas City, not their home city. That feature sets the system apart from weather apps that deliver information based on users' ZIP code but don't automatically update their locations when users travel.

Greg Carbin, the warning coordination meteorologist at the national Storm Prediction Center in Norman, Okla, said in a typical year most smartphone users will probably receive relatively few weather alerts.

"Even in those areas of the country where there's a lot of severe weather, the frequency with which you would be alerted is pretty low," Carbin said.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

View the original article here

Society not ready for heat waves coming with climate change

Health officials are better prepared for heat waves than they used to be, but they have more to do in the face of climate change, experts say.

Denny Simmons, Evansville Courier & Press/AP

Evelyn Levitt, 7, kneels in the waters of Old National Bank's fountain in Evansville, Ind., on June 25.

Denny Simmons, Evansville Courier & Press/AP

Evelyn Levitt, 7, kneels in the waters of Old National Bank's fountain in Evansville, Ind., on June 25.

"Nationally and internationally we are much more aware of the danger of extreme heat than we were in 1995," says sociologist Eric Klinenberg, author of Heat Wave: A social autopsy of disaster in Chicago, about the three-day heat wave that caused 739 excess deaths and thousands of hospitalizations in 1995.

"We're more prepared than we were in 1995. A lot of Americans are still vulnerable, and our power grid is vulnerable, too."

Medical workers reported few problems related to the past week's heat wave in parts of the USA that suffered extreme temperatures but were spared Friday night's storms that knocked out power to more than 3 million customers.

But in the District of Columbia, where heat and power outages struck together, sick patients at home who rely on electronic medical devices suffered doubly, and hospitals had to improvise, says Bill Frohna, chairman of the emergency department at MedStar Washington Hospital Center. "Before the storm came we saw some heat-related stuff, but once you throw the power issue on top of the heat, families didn't know what to do," Frohna said. "When no one has power they don't have a backup plan."

Even the Washington hospital had a plan for heat and a plan for outages, but not a plan for the two together, Frohna said.

After storms cut power to millions, hospital workers Saturday saw a spike in patients with chronic diseases who need electricity to operate home dialysis units and machines that deliver intravenous fluids, medications, tube feedings and oxygen, Frohna said.

Many arrived at the hospital with temperatures of 104 and could have been discharged after emergency cooling treatment and hydration, if they had a safe place to go, but they didn't, Frohna said.

Instead, hospital workers opened waiting spaces in part of the emergency room and the hospital's central registration area to let patients convalesce with their family members while caseworkers searched for cool, safe places with power where they can be sent.

Overall, the hospital saw a daily increase of 15% to 30% above normal during the weekend and Monday, Frohna said.

"Saturday (was) one of our biggest Saturdays in recent memory," he said.

Parts of the country that did not lose power because of the storm fared better.

In Indiana, where the heat wave has been going strong for a week, 153 emergency patients visited the state's emergency rooms for heat-related issues in all of last week, says Amy Reel, spokeswoman for the Indiana State Department of Health. The number of heat-related injuries has been relatively small because everyone is taking the heat seriously, says Wishard Hospital emergency physician John Boe. "There's more awareness of how dangerous this kind of weather can be," Boe said.

The news media have gotten better at getting the word out. Hospitals are better prepared. Public officials have made more cooling centers available and neighbors are checking on neighbors without air conditioning, Boe said.

Boe, who teaches at Indiana University's Department of Emergency Medicine, says the Chicago heat wave of 1995 was a turning point in his field.

"In our teachings, they always talk about the Chicago heat wave," he said.

Multiple factors led to the high death toll of the Chicago heat wave, Klinenberg says. High humidity combined with triple-digit heat and little nighttime cooling to turn the lakeside city into a furnace. Mayor Richard Daley and the city's fire and health commissioners were away on vacation. And the city failed to implement its plan for extreme heat, Klinenberg says.

High demand for electricity caused outages, and much of the city lost water as residents opened hydrants to cool off and then fought with city officials trying to close them. Most of the fatalities were elderly, isolated bachelors in the poorest sections of town, Klinenberg says.

Even worse disasters happened in Europe in 2003, when 70,000 excess deaths were caused by an extreme heat event that lasted three weeks, and in Russia in 2010, when a heat wave caused 50,000 excess deaths.

The USA has yet to experience such an extreme heat event, but some experts believe that with climate change it's only a matter of time.

Climate projections see global warming driving longer, warmer and more frequent heat waves for North America in coming years, says Princeton climate scientist Ngar-Cheung Lau.

Essentially, global warming raises the odds of heat waves, and at the same time worsens their effects due to the warmer temperature it brings on average, he says. "One cannot attach certainty to any one weather event being driven by climate change, but this heat wave is certainly striking in its size, severity and duration, similar to the sort of heat waves seen in climate projections," Lau says.

Klinenberg says cities such as Washington, Philadelphia and New York City are ill prepared.

"We need to make sure that cities can get through the worst heat wave," he says. "In New York City, police officers drive through streets using loudspeakers asking people to turn down their air conditioning during the day. The power grid can't handle it."

Contributing: Dan Vergano

For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

View the original article here