Early warning system

Thu Mar 22 06:36:26 UTC 2001

On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 22:09:38 -0800, "Eric A. Hall" <ehall at ehsco.com>
wrote:

>Mailing lists would probably be the most effective, but not sure that
>spamming all known mailing lists is a good idea when an outage is only
>goint to affect a specific area, and nobody will maintain yet another
>subscription on a list that never gets any traffic.

One possibility:

(1) Utility Co creates a mailing list for each geographical region.

(2) Those customers who want notification subscribe to the list for
their region.

(3) The customer creates an email filter that catches email from that
list, & triggers the customer's preferred notification method. (SMS
message, pager, squawk from their workstation, UPS triggerered power
down, etc.)
You could possibly include PGP sig's on the mailout, to prevent hoax
notifications. If the system fails, you're no worse off than you are
now.

Doesn't seem all /that/ difficult, & wouldn't inconvenience anyone who
didn't want to opt in to it.

>Gets back to radio/tv, which probably have the most visibility for the
>relevant people, and which is also constrained to geographically relevant
>areas by default. But they don't seem to like giving explicit notice, as I
>said, perhaps because they fear resulting criminal activity.

Or fear of creating a (greater) public perception of poor service.

-- 
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 . | ,. w ,   "Some people are alive only because
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