A year ago, in the context of hurricane evacuation: Why not a simple web site or phone app to determine whether one must evacuate?
In the latest Texas flooding tragedy, it seems that emergency alerts were sent out to mobile phones. As with hurricane warnings, however, it fell to the individual to determine whether the phone’s current location merited going back to sleep or running for higher ground at top speed.
Why can’t it be a computer’s job to intersect the alert with the phone’s location and, ignoring any sleep silence modes, recommend a definitive course of action? (A year ago, I asked “Why is it a human’s job to do something that can be done much more reliably by a computer?”)
The Wall Street Journal says that flash flood warnings went out, but they weren’t specific:
The National Weather Service said that on Thursday morning it briefed emergency management. By 1:18 p.m. it issued a watch that said locally heavy rainfall could cause flash flooding across eight counties, including Kerr, where Camp Mystic, the girls summer camp that was heavily struck by the flooding, is located. Kerr County is dotted with riverside summer camps as well as recreational-vehicle parks and hotels for vacationers. Overnight it would become the most severely impacted county.
At that time, forecasters expected a maximum of 3 to 7 inches of rain.
The first flash-flood warning—which means flooding is imminent or already happening—came at 1:14 a.m. Friday from the National Weather Service office in nearby San Antonio hours ahead of the Guadalupe’s rise.
Two hours later, the office issued a catastrophic warning, or a flash-flood emergency, for the region.
The warning covered “eight counties” and, in fact, the vast majority of people in those eight counties didn’t have anything to fear. Kerr County alone is 1,100 square miles. The typical resident of the U.S. is not a hydrologist. Why isn’t it a computer’s job to figure out whether a phone is currently located in a river’s floodplain and, if so, provide specific directions regarding how to reach higher ground?
Below is an example warning from the National Weather Service’s X account, which seems to require a lot of interpretation, e.g., knowledge of where one’s location is relative to the Guadalupe River. A typical young American doesn’t know north from south (I remember calling a mobile carrier store on Route 9 in the Boston suburbs and asking the clerk if he was on the north or south side of this road, which run east-west. He was completely stumped by the question and, even after seeking assistance from some fellow workers, couldn’t answer it.) Also, the warnings were issued only in English and Spanish. In a country with an asylum-based immigration system there is no reason to expect someone living in the U.S. to speak either English or Spanish. A phone app, however, can work in any language supported by a smartphone (77 for Android; roughly 40 for iPhone).
The official government attitude seems to be to keep doing whatever failed in the past. In a world where almost everyone has a smartphone (taxpayer funded for those who don’t work), the go-to idea is an early 1900s-style siren system (PBS):
Another idea from the same PBS article is that more humans can be a substitute for a computer system:
> A typical young American doesn’t know north from south
In this case, sorry, $crew the typical young American.
Observing the sun and telling the principal directions was on the first pages of the “World and Man” textbook, recommended reading for Soviet and post-Soviet Russian pre-school/1st grade.
If you can’t tell where you are by simple observation, you don’t know where you are, period.
If it’s going to take a few generations of Darwin to fix that, then so be it.
Don’t make it to the point where the next generation needs to learn Mandarin to survive.
Always wondered how to manetain situational awareness during a loss of all utilities during severe weather. There isn’t going to be any phone network or electricity during a hurricane or tornado. A personal radar station or hard mounted camera might be the best solution. Satellite communication probably won’t work in extreme rain & wind. We need Greenspun back in Fl*rida to test starlink in a hurricane.
Communications and electricity work fine up to the point where people need to evacuate. I am not sure what the value of Internet service would be after a hurricane or flood is on top of wherever one happens to be. If your home isn’t in a safe location you either evacuated to somewhere safe or you didn’t.