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CORRECTION AND UPDATE When I wrote the article below, I forgot something pretty important: Even though, from the user’s perspective, feeds generally behave like “push media,” in fact they are not push media. This pretty much undermines the point of this article. See my Nov. 11 followup article which explores the issue of feeds and push media. Some good came of this, after all.

For the record, here’s my original article…

I missed the excitement this morning.

Around 8am MST, there was a chemical leak at a Lexmark facility northeast of my town, Boulder, CO. According to the Rocky Mountain News, workers at the plant were mixing epoxies when a fire started, causing a smoke plume with toxic vapors. Six workers were taken to the hospital, and four were kept there for treatment. Residents within a 2-mile radius were warned via reverse-911 phone notification to stay inside and shut their doors and windows as a hazmat team cleaned up the accident site. A major nearby road, the Diagonal Highway, was closed for two hours.

I live about 5 miles south of the accident site, and the prevailing winds here blow east, so I wasn’t at much risk of exposure. Around 9:30 am I went for my daily walk along the South Boulder Creek. Just before I headed out, I downloaded my podcasts for the day – including the Denver Post “All News” podcast, which has become one of my main sources of local news. I was listening to it as I walked. When I got back home, I worked.

It wasn’t until I saw this E-Media Tidbits posting by my colleague and fellow Boulderite Steve Outing that I learned of the leak.

This got me thinking: We need emergency feeds for public notification…

REPLAY: IMAGINE THIS…

What if, right when Boulder County officials put the reverse-911 phone system into action this morning, they’d also published to the web (using a simple blogging tool) a short text-based warning about the incident. That item would be tagged with the category “emergency.” This tag/category would instantly add the alert to a special feed for emergency communications.

Here’s the beauty: A feed is nothing more than a type of XML (extensible markup language) file. In short, it’s just information that’s categorized and packaged in a way that’s very easy and fast to distribute and repurpose in myriad ways.

Alerts transmitted via feed could be instantly transmitted (directly or indirectly) to cell phones, pagers, personal computers, newsrooms, schools, HAM radio repeaters, hospitals, radio stations… you name it!

In short, I think that perhaps feeds could form the basis of a new, more flexible, and highly targetable “emergency feedcast system.” I’m not saying feeds could or should replace the EBS or reverse 911, but they might make a very useful complement.

If my state or county offered emergency alerts by feed, I could configure my feed reader to pop local emergency alerts on the screen, above all other windows, as soon as it came through – and even play a special tone. If such a system had been in place this morning, I would have encountered the emergency alert while I was reading the national and international news and sorting through e-mail just after breakfast.

…Also, imagine that the Denver Post’s newsroom subscribes to the emergency alert feed. In minutes (say, by 8:30 AM), someone there could record a quick audio “breaking news” announcement and splice it into the beginning of that day’s podcast, then re-upload the file. Then, everyone who downloads the podcast after that time would get a version that starts with the breaking news announcement, and that specifies the affected area and instructs people where to get more information.

You’d better believe that if I’d heard that announcement as I’d set out along the South Boulder Creek Path at 9:30 this morning, I’d have turned right around and went back home. My walk could wait. I have asthma, so even though I live 3 miles outside the declared “close your doors and windows” radius, it’s wise for me to be cautious about possible exposure to lung irritants.

(Of course, as Steve Outing pointed out, the Denver Post and other local papers did a great job of getting prompt stories about the chemical leak onto their web sites ASAP today. So even without an emergency feed, they had the information. So they could have spliced in a breaking news announcement to today’s podcast. I’m not faulting them for not doing this – but they might want to keep it in mind for future emergencies, nudge nudge…)

…And my husband, who has a cell phone with internet connectivity (so he can subscribe to feeds and other kinds of online alerts), would have received the message as soon as he turned his phone on this morning. He was up in Fort Collins last night, and his route back home to Boulder includes the stretch of Diagonal Highway that was closed down for two hours due to the leak. See – it’s useful for residents who aren’t home to get local emergency alerts, too.

This is just a thought. I’m sure a feed-based alert system would have challenges and pitfalls. However, if there was a system of feeds used exclusively for official emergency alerts, the timeliness and flexibility of the system might make it worth the effort. And people could subscribe voluntarily, by whatever means works for them.

And, did I mention… Feeds are free! Really, you could even set up a basic system using a simple (and also free) blogging tool. Government agencies surely would love that part. Nobody’s ever got enough money for emergency response.