The news from Texas has been heartrending. Historian Heather Cox Richardson says the National Weather Service did publish flash flood warnings, but the head of Kerr County said the warning systems that would have conveyed that locally were not in place because they had decided that cost too much.

Man.

My husband got his ham radio license after 24 hours of not being able to reach his aunt’s family very close to the epicenter of the big 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake (they were okay but their house had stories to tell) and from there he did emergency communications volunteering with the city, the county, and the Red Cross.

I said in agony over the lost campers in Texas, Don’t they have reverse-911 there!

And then went, Wait. Do they?

Which got him reminiscing. He knew all the people who started that. It began with an idea: the city had topography maps and it had 24 fax machines. What if… So they kluged up a system where if there was a risk of flooding, the homes in the lowest elevations could get a warning phone call by having a switch that disconnected all incoming faxes, because that’s not the priority in an emergency, and took over the faxes’ phone lines to call out to those homes with a pre-recorded message.

Twenty-four numbers at a time. That’s all.

But then you have the computer call 24 more, and 24 more…

That concept got tested pretty quickly thereafter: we had our 100 year flood in 1998. There were kids boogie-boarding down our street. There was the friend who saw his koi from his back yard swim past his feet in the front yard to go live happily ever after in the Bay (good luck). The elementary school principal hauled a canoe out and got himself in the paper paddling across the playground just for fun but there really wasn’t much water there. Might have drowned a few gophers, though.

There was one notable fire department rescue operation where someone thought his big pickup could easily do that puddle and tried to drive through the steep railroad underpass. Oops.

So anyway. Instantly it became: how do we make it so we can reach everybody? In time? Can we do it all at once?

Well let’s see: the Feds had passed a law requiring the phone companies to provide the phone number to every address for 911 calls so that the first responders could know where to go no matter how much information the caller was able to give them. Early cell phones weren’t covered. The Feds made them cover them, too.

That database existed. How about if you invert it?

You could draw a circle on the map and say, everything in this boundary, or you could say everybody in the city.

And thus they created the reverse-911 system that lets you know there’s an emergency.

The surrounding cities thought this was great and copied us.

The county thought this was great and copied us.

And it took off from there.

I thought by now everybody had it. I cannot for the life of me imagine why on earth any municipality wouldn’t.