When my cell phone rang at 4:28 a.m. on Aug. 2, I immediately thought it was an emergency. And it was, sort of. The federal government had raised the terrorism threat level to "orange" in Washington, New York and northern New Jersey. Problem was, the news had broken on Aug. 1.
For more than a year I've been testing a version of a new service rolled out officially to D.C. residents in July in which alerts -- not just about terrorism, but weather, exploding manhole covers and traffic problems -- are sent by text messages to mobile phones and e-mail accounts. Like most everything related to homeland security, a cottage industry has emerged around developing a modern emergency broadcasting system.
Washington is the first major city to offer text alert service free to residents, and its system illustrates both the promise and problems of terror alert technology, which is in early stages.
Messages can reach people quickly, direct them away from danger or warn them of other problems. But the messages must be short. It took three separate ones to tell me about the orange alert. More strangely, the first two arrived at 4:28 a.m. and the third at 12:04 p.m.
Ned Ingraham, senior manager of information technology for D.C.'s Emergency Management Agency, says the glitch, which sent messages many hours after the alert was heightened, was the government's fault. "We had some internal problems with the software," he said, but he declined to elaborate.
Daniel Gadra, vice president and general counsel at Roam Secure Inc., a 10-person Arlington company that developed the system, downplayed the problem, saying it was easily fixed. He said that when jurisdictions first roll out such systems, there are often little snags, but they are usually quickly worked out.
There were two problems, according to a source familiar with the situation who did not want to be identified because he does work with the District. No one pushed the send button until several hours after the announcement, and then a virus protection system that scans outgoing messages held up the alert.
Ingraham says he's "99.8 percent certain" the problem has been eliminated. So far, 3,200 people have signed up for the D.C. system at www.dc.gov.
Meanwhile city officials are working with representatives of Washington suburbs to connect their separate text messaging system, Ingraham said. (Roam Secure has developed systems for Arlington and Fairfax counties, as well as one soon to be launched in Montgomery County.)
A handful of companies are competing with Roam Secure for this market. One, AlertsUSA in Nashville, lets customers press a phone button to hear additional information through an audio stream. Users of Nextel mobile phone services can choose from a menu of alerts, including a personal "homeland security" team from AlertsUSA, weather updates from The Weather Channel and breaking news from CNN.com.
