Text Messaging Featured Article

A couple of weeks ago on a Saturday night, I was sitting in my living room watching TV when, all of a sudden, I heard that irritating noise alerting everyone to an emergency broadcast message. I didn’t see any message on the TV screen and then I realized that the sound was coming from my smartphone. I had just received a text message with the warning: “Flash flood alert for the next half hour.” Maybe five minutes passed, there was a crack of thunder and the heavens opened up. There was a small river of water flowing down my street.

I received several similar alert messages when Hurricane Sandy hit New York a couple of years ago. As annoying as the sound is, the messages were very timely and amazingly accurate. This weekend, the Dominion Virginia Power company announced that it was rolling out a text messaging system designed to alert people of such instances as critical storm preparation information, energy conditions and statewide emergencies affecting the electric utility's customers.

Dominion Resources, Inc., more commonly referred to as Dominion, is a power and energy company that is headquartered in Richmond, Virginia. It supplies electricity to parts of Virginia and North Carolina and it also supplies natural gas to parts of West Virginia, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and eastern North Carolina. As you can see, this text messaging system can cover quite a bit of ground.

The timing of this announcement comes at a crucial time, as this past weekend marked the beginning of hurricane season. The system is designed to be a one-way text message that will circulate general messages describing weather conditions, or if power is expected to be disrupted and if so for how long.

 Kristen Reese, who is Dominion Resources Inc.'s manager of digital communication, explained, "If we're expecting a large storm we could text them a storm prep message. A message might say, ‘We're expecting a large-scale outage. Make sure you have our mobile site bookmarked.’” Reese also said that the message would include a reminder that customers can report outages, or check the status of an outage, on Dominion Virginia Power's mobile website. They will be restricted to 160 characters in length.

Although Dominion is the company that will be responsible for the alert messages, it will not be necessary to be a customer in order to sign up for the service. Yes, you do have to sign up for the service, but it will be free. We know this because Le-Ha Anderson, a company spokeswoman, said, "You don't need to be a Dominion customer to sign up for the service. The alerts will be limited to critically important information and not marketing content."

This system is something that Dominion has been working on for several years now. A thunderstorm system that swept through the area in June 2012 left over a million customers in the dark throughout the state of Virginia. Anderson mentioned, “We started hearing customers say 'this is something you could text us.” This is an effort by Dominion to be in the spaces where our customers go to get information, such as Facebook, Twitter (News - Alert) and the company's mobile dom.com site, as well as its toll-free telephone number.”

This year, the expectation from the National Oceanic (News - Alert) and Atmospheric Administration is that the hurricane season should see near or below normal hurricanes. There is only a 70 percent chance that of maybe 8-13 named storms. In any event, this is a valued way for information to reach people who normally would not have any way of knowing how long their power may be out, or if they should be preparing for a disaster.

In addition to Dominion’s alert text messaging system, the Virginia Department of Emergency Management has also developed a mobile app designed to state residents with weather and emergency information. The department’s public affairs director, Dawn Eischen said, "We definitely think that push notifications are the way to go. A lot of information that people are getting today is from mobile devices and we've seen an increase in the number of people using mobile devices to get information during an emergency."