New Study Gives Telephone Notifications High Marks

Let's begin with full disclosure. I worked for a telephone notification company for ten years. I've seen plenty of telephone notification success stories first hand. I've seen failures, too. So, I believe as many others do that the most effective notification and warning program involves multiples means of communications. (Certain vendors will disagree.)

With that said, a new report shows telephone warnings were "extremely effective in protecting human life" during the 2007 San Diego wildfires. The study was conducted for FEMA by a team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

The team looked for behavior patterns among 1200 households in the fire evacuation area. They found that people in the threatened area were much more likely to receive first word of an evacuation via telephone calling systems over any other method. Over 42% of the households surveyed received their first evacuation notice from an automated telephone call. The next closest was only 7.7% from television.

People who received automated calls were more likely to evacuate than those who did not receive a call, according to the study. However, call recipients generally didn't evacuate just because of the automated telephone call. They likely confirmed the need to evacuate through the media or "informal contact", such as friends and family. (Another point for using multiple communication modes.)

The study didn't address ability of telephone notification systems to reach large quantities of people in a short period of time (another subject for another time), but did confirm that telephone notifications can be very effective in getting people to leave their homes.

Besides the general findings of their report, Dr. John Sorensen and team did an excellent job of referencing sociological aspects of warnings and evacuations. The report is a good source of information and insight for all interested in notifications and warnings. You can download a copy at http://galainsolutions.com/galain_resources.html.

Meantime, we're quite excited about being part of Emergency Management's new web site. We think it fills a void, and can be a strong asset for public safety professionals. We'll do our best to add compelling content and to listen to you and your suggestions.

Rick Wimberly