I support Rich's suggestion to consider emergency response in such a
tragedy in terms of broadcast not narrowcast solutions. This is precisely
why DDPS here at MSU implemented and regularly tests a reverse 911 system
with the emergency response teams across campus. Remember that bandwidth
can very quickly become an issue when everyone uses the web and their cell
phones in an emergency.
As the tragedy unfolded Monday morning I visited Virgina Tech's main web
site several times specifically to see how they were handling their web
presence in this emergency.
VT very quickly took down their main home page and replaced it with a low
bandwidth text only homepage. The first paragraph explained the situation
as they understood it at the time: repeated shots being fired in one of the
buildings, police on the scene, university in process of being locked
down. Then they explained that access to all online databases from the web
site had been suspended to minimize bandwidth. Following this announcement
the main page was a pre-prepared, text only version of their homepage that
provided low bandwidth access to their entire site.
PBS news last evening explored some of the communication technology issues
of the event in a story titled, "Technology: The NewsHour looks into using
technology to communicate". An audio version of this story is available
online at:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/newshour_index.html
Listen to this story and consider if the technology solutions you suggest
could handle the 53 million hits by early Monday afternoon that caused the
VT student newspaper's web site to be shut down for a time.
Bob Kriegel
systems analyst, Anthony Hall emergency team leader
Dept. of Animal Science, MSU
