Yesterday’s AT&T cellular service outage throughout Hawaii makes you wonder how many of our civil defense and other first responders plan to use their cell phone during our next hurricane, flood or power outage to get the word out. The outage lasted longer than reported in the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin accounts. Our service wasn’t restored fully until close to 5 p.m., making it a 10-hour outage. Maybe we should just forget about relying on cell phone technology in our next crisis. Yesterday’s prolonged outage creates more doubts about the technology's reliability.
CHORE was launched in 2006 after officials responding to an earthquake emergency obviously didn't measure up; see CHORE's earliest posts. Their performance left an opening for average citizens to weigh in with experience-based suggestions to improve crisis communications. The many deaths recorded after California's wildfires also revealed gaps in officials' ability to communicate effectively. Visitors are invited to comment with their own ideas.