Disaster bulletins by cellphone mail

Japan gets hit by most things that nature has to offer; typhoons, earthquakes, volcanoes. Add to that a nuclear industry that has in the past regarded mixing uranium in a bucket as perfectly acceptable, and the need for systems to get disaster alerts out to the populace becomes all the more pressing. To that end, Tsuruga City in Fukui prefecture is adding cellphone mail to the usual arsenal of megaphones and emergency broadcasts. Its Y20 mn system should be up and running by year-end and will also send out faxes and phone up fixed-line phones with voice messages in the event of a disaster. Doesn't sound like it would necessarily make for a calm evacuation, if there can be such a thing, but as the city is home to four nuclear reactors and is too close for comfort to the Mihama reactor at which four people were recently killed, we understand their urgency.

[Via Slashdot Japan (Japanese)]