On Wed, 21 Mar 2001 22:09:38 -0800, "Eric A. Hall" <ehall@ehsco.com> wrote:
Mailing lists would probably be the most effective, but not sure that spamming all known mailing lists is a good idea when an outage is only goint to affect a specific area, and nobody will maintain yet another subscription on a list that never gets any traffic.
One possibility: (1) Utility Co creates a mailing list for each geographical region. (2) Those customers who want notification subscribe to the list for their region. (3) The customer creates an email filter that catches email from that list, & triggers the customer's preferred notification method. (SMS message, pager, squawk from their workstation, UPS triggerered power down, etc.) You could possibly include PGP sig's on the mailout, to prevent hoax notifications. If the system fails, you're no worse off than you are now. Doesn't seem all /that/ difficult, & wouldn't inconvenience anyone who didn't want to opt in to it.
Gets back to radio/tv, which probably have the most visibility for the relevant people, and which is also constrained to geographically relevant areas by default. But they don't seem to like giving explicit notice, as I said, perhaps because they fear resulting criminal activity.
Or fear of creating a (greater) public perception of poor service. -- W . | ,. w , "Some people are alive only because \|/ \|/ it is illegal to kill them." Perna condita delenda est ---^----^---------------------------------------------------------------