On Dec 5, 2008, at 9:01 AM, David Cantrell wrote:
On Thu, Dec 04, 2008 at 11:08:49AM -0600, Jack Bates wrote:
911 services are heavily used when a geographical area has an emergency, and that emergency usually includes not having power.
Yes, and it usually involves several thousand people all phoning to report the same damned thing, clogging up the emergency service's lines so that *other* emergencies (like, say, someone having a heart attack) don't get dealt with.
Unless you live in a natural disaster prone location.
So don't do that. It's really rather silly.
I've always thought that people who choose to live on flood plains or on the side of active volcanos etc are at least a little bit crazy. Of course, if they're so poor that they don't have any choice (Bangladesh, perhaps) then they can't afford the non-existent POTS infrastructure anyway - but someone in the village might have a mobile.
There is literarily no place on the planet that is safe from natural disaster. It's just that the recurrence times differ, and can be rather long in places, giving an illusion of safety. For example, for the recent tsunami in Indonesia, India and Sri Lanka, the recurrence time is estimated to be ~1000 years. Most people would think that they do not have to worry about a once per 1000 year danger, until the water starts entering the second story. Regards Marshall
Or if your grandmother's alert bracelet requires a phone line for notification.
That's no reason for almost anyone to have a POTS line, because almost everyone doesn't live with their grandmother, and almost all grandmothers don't have alert bracelets.
-- David Cantrell | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
comparative and superlative explained:
<Huhn> worse, worser, worsest, worsted, wasted