Preparing for Natural Disasters: 5 Resilience Communication Tools
By Stephanie Osorno, Marketing Copywriter at Alertus Technologies
Unpredictable, potentially life-threatening events — including fires, severe weather, volcano eruptions, and earthquakes — can happen anywhere, at any given moment.
Most recently, the Caribbean island of St. Vincent was hit with two consecutive volcano eruptions from the La Soufrière volcano, forcing thousands of residents to evacuate. In addition, between 2019 and 2020 alone, Australia experienced a series of damaging bushfires.
Having an effective crisis communication plan is crucial for ensuring safety and maintaining business continuity in the event of a natural disaster, regardless of where your organization may be located. To help you better prepare for natural disaster emergencies, below are five examples of resilience communication tools using Mass Notification System (MNS) technology.
1. Weather Monitoring
Staying informed about severe weather isn’t always an easy task. Oftentimes it requires actively seeking out weather updates through the weather channel, a weather radio, or a weather app — and those updates may not always be accurate for your location.
A high-quality and reliable MNS can help simplify weather monitoring by offering weather feed integration from AccuWeather Skyguard®, Severe Weather Warnings, and the NWS for geo targeted weather alerts specific to your exact location and region.
This means you’ll be able to more easily heighten severe weather awareness with real-time weather updates and up-to-the-minute, site-specific warnings.
2. Giant Voice Systems for Large Outdoor Footprints
With limited time to spare during a natural disaster event, your organization’s emergency alerting process should be efficient and seamless. But how do you quickly create urgency and spread the word within a large outdoor environment? Implementing a giant outdoor voice system is a great way to rapidly disseminate critical information to your entire outdoor population.
The Alertus High Power Speaker Arrays (HPSA), for example, instantly send out clear outdoor voice messages using audible siren tones and industry leading text-to-speech (TTS) technology. Keep in mind that your emergency notifications will need to be intelligible and informative to elicit an immediate response.
Alertus’ newest Mobile High Power Speaker Array (HPSA) offers those same alerting capabilities, with the added bonus of functioning on a mobile trailer. The mobile HPSA is designed to be pulled with a standard trailer hitch to your desired communication area and set up by one person within 15 minutes after arriving on scene, making it an ideal solution for immediate natural disaster notification.
3. One-Touch Activation
In the face of a natural disaster, the last thing you want is to lose valuable time deploying multiple, disparate notification systems. By utilizing an MNS with true, single point of activation capability, you can activate all emergency notification endpoints simultaneously.
Alertus offers a wide range of one-touch activation options for emergency notification at the push of a button:
Hard-Wired Activation Buttons
Desktop Activator
USB Panic Button
Personal WiFi Button
Single point of activation is vital for mitigating harm and reducing emergency response times when it matters the most.
4. Mobile Alerting
A mobile push notification allows you to reach your intended audience, even when they’re away from their desk or not checking email, using just a WiFi connection. This helps to avoid notification delays or disruptions in the event of a time-sensitive natural disaster when a spike in cellular network usage is likely.
The Alertus Mobile App Suite, for instance, enhances mobile notification between authorized dispatchers and end users through activator and recipient mobile app offerings. Alerts could be planned ahead of time through preset emergency templates and edited on the fly to fit the specific emergency.
For some areas, Alertus’ Cell Broadcasting solution is a good alternative for immediately sending a notification to any mobile device within a specific geolocation. With a cell broadcasting-based notification, you can send bulk messages at once to multiple mobile devices within a targeted location, without the need for individual phone numbers or subscribers.
5. Unified Organizational Communication
Business disruptions are inevitable in the wake of natural disasters and other critical incidents. However, desktop alerts can help to reduce panic, maintain a regular flow of communication, and keep everyone on the same page amid a chaotic and nerve-racking circumstance. For example, you may opt to send a desktop alert such as, “In light of the recent tornado damage, our office will remain closed until the end of the week. Please standby for further updates and stay safe.”
Unlike emails that could potentially get lost in a crowded inbox, a desktop notification captures attention immediately with a visible, easy-to-read pop-up message directly on a desktop computer. The Alertus Desktop™ Notification comes with an option to use full-screen or partial-screen computer desktop notifications, or a less intrusive ticker alert at the top of the screen.
Similarly, the Alertus Desktop™ for Chrome solution offers desktop alerting capabilities on Chrome browsers and Chromebook computers and tablets for any employees who may be working remotely or off-site.
While mother nature is unpredictable, these resilience communication tools can help you protect your community and business as best as possible during a natural disaster.