"As falls Wichita..."

The most potential disaster to strike Wichita, KS is undoubtedly a tornado. Within my lifetime, two towns near Wichita, one about 15 minutes east and the other about 2 hours west, have been leveled due to tornadoes. In the first instance, in Andover, this tornado was part of an outbreak of 55 tornadoes in six states on one day. The second town, Greensburg, was leved by one of 123 tornadoes over a 3-day period. This leaves Wichita quite vulnerable to tornado attacks.

Tornadoes to not by nature leave a wide path of destruction. They are typically kept to one direct route with a range that is really only large enough to take out small towns. For a city the size of Wichita (the largest city in Kansas (135 sq mi)), there would likely need to be multipe tornadoes, and this is not uncommon. Both of the aforementioned tornadoes were only parts of larger networks.

For recovery, the city would need to take the same approach--make each person, each family, each neighborhood part of a larger network. Before such a disaster happens, a community emergency website should be set up for people to upload mobile and emergency phone numbers, e-mail, and instant messaging. This database would be kept confidential until an emergency is declared. Then it would become open to public use for the required period of time. Access to it should be granted through PC or phone, and it must be easily searchable, either by first name, last name, or address.

For those not using this technology, Wichita has a large network of tornado/emergency sirens. These not only blare a tornado warning, but can give verbal instructions covering the entire city. But in the event of one or several strong tornados, these may have to be re-mounted if knocked down or destroyed.

After the Greensburg tornado, many people were connected to each other through their phones. A group of teenagers started keeping a spiral notebook of everybody's mobile phone numbers. This kind of set-up should be in place before a disaster strikes.

On a grander scale, Wichita is a relatively small city. An average person can reasonably bike from one corner to the far one in an hour. There is also a sense of community which will help keep the city connected. Also, in the case of large tornadoes, other communities not affected have come to help.

Wichita is also mostly suburban sprawl, which will automatically cut down on entire blocks of massive apartment buildings falling over. But for these instances, I have a new smartphone app idea:

911Now: This is a community based emergency response system to get people help when official public services are already working around the clock. When activating this program, which would require an official declaration of a state of emergency, the phone becomes an emergency beacon, transmitting an exact location including a map to other phones with the application in a certain radius. For cities where the population is dense, a radius of a half a mile may be all that is necessary. For more sparsely populated areas, like much of Kansas, a radius of 5-10 miles may be necessary.

Once the emergency alert shows up on a person's phone, it then takes on characteristics similar to a Facebook status update. Any person who recieves the alert may publicly comment on it, saying things like "I'm on the way," or "We need a towtruck" to keep other would-be responders appraised of the situation.

I don't have the tech ability to create this kind of app. Anybody interested? It seems it would also require government involvement for the state of emergency.

I would hope that this feature would become standard on all smartphones sold around the world.