"You want to have as many layers of notification as possible."  So says Travis Bryant, public safety director for Fayetteville State University, Fayetteville, NC.  Bryant goes on to describe the system the university deployed as "a comprehensive solution that ensures that our people will receive notification regardless of where they are on campus.  The solution provides peace of mind for everyone."

February 7, 2012 marks the 200-year anniversary of the last in the 1811-1812 series of earthquakes that struck the Mississippi Valley along the New Madrid Seismic Zone.  The last quake in this series destroyed the town of New Madrid, Missouri, and also created Reelfoot Lake in northwest Tennessee.

There's little question that social media in now a valuable tool for emergency managers, with incidents such as the tsunami in Japan and last spring's tornadoes that swept across the southern U.S. making that point crystal clear.

However, as we're all aware, social media, at last in its present state, is far from being an end-all for emergency mass notification communications.

According to a recent survey of fire safety professionals, false alarms continue to rank as one of their biggest concerns.

Granted, they didn't do it right away.  But Abingdon, Virginia, which was founded in the 1770s, was eventually among the very first U.S. towns to deploy a 4.9GHz wireless broadband network with the specific intent to streamline emergency communications between first responders and its citizens back in 2009.

The rapid expansion of social media and mobile communications clearly dictates that government agencies need to completely re-think their attitudes with regard to the role this new technology now plays in emergency preparedness.  This was the collective and overwhelming conclusion reached by panelists and audience members in attendance at the October panel discussion conducted by the National Policy Institute in Washington D.C.

When officials of Virginia Tech University found themselves initiating emergency alerting procedures in response to an on-campus shooting recently, it could only have been a grim reminder of the tragic event of April 2007 where a gunman killed 33 people on the campus.

Using Twitter, text messages and e-mail, as well as a website alert, this time officials immediately announced a complete campus lockdown, which continued every 30 minutes until the lockdown ended later Thursday evening.

We'll be the first to admit, starting a blog and then keeping it going was no easy task.  Nevertheless, we're glad we did.  Really?  What could be more satisfying than serving the needs of professionals in emergency management who hold so much responsibility for safeguarding us all.

It almost seems as if a day doesn't go by that you don't read or hear about a new application for GPS technology.  Originally developed for the military, it did not take long for Global Positioning Systems technology to be applied to a wide variety of other uses both in government and private enterprise.

Whenever public address systems are integrated with warning systems such as fire alarms, it is critical to understand the very unique requirements of emergency alerting and evacuation.  Successful integration can only be achieved after first acknowledging that the critical demands of warning and evacuation far outweigh the requirements of a typical PA system.