Saturday the civil defense system was activated to warn us of potential thunderstorm and flash flood danger on the west side of Kauai. I happened to be at the library where an automated call came in and Ed the librarian relayed word to the patrons.
It was already pouring rain and lightning was going off, lighting up noticeably during the cloud-darkened daylight. While I understand the weather service is tasked with issuing these warnings (as well as "watches"), it seemed fairly obvious that it was stormy and unnecessary travel was inadvisable.
More importantly, why in this day and age don't we have civil defense alerts appearing on our phones? Clearly we have the technology, but either the civil defense people for some reason aren't using it or if they are it is certainly not widely used at all.
Isn't this important? Today's Boston tragedy underscores that things can happen any time, any where. Do we really want to depend on Twitter? Civil defense must be consuming a lot of tax dollars and has an important public trust: why aren't they already on my phone?
I haven't researched it but I bet the civil defense is largely using very outdated legacy technology and probably doesn't have budget to do new things. Cellular carriers decide what goes on our phones, and civil defense warnings surely ranks well below Facebook and games ... We have everything to do this (as one tiny example) and we don't seem to be able to actually do it. All we need to do is set priorities, choose, and act. It isn't hard, it could save lives.
Fortunately, for me at least it was just heavy rain (wipers on fast) and I saw no reports of damage or injury.
Agreed it is a probably a budgetary restraint but no doubt bureaucratic inertia plays a part as well.
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