Disaster alerts on the desktop
Written by Writer on Friday, October 3rd, 2008
APP Shot
Disaster alerts on the desktop
As never before in this generation, the 2004 tsunami brought home to Thailand the stark fact that she might be Mother Nature, but she’s arguably a more efficient killer than nurturer.
Even though it is US-biased, Earth Alerts provides weather and disaster reports centred on Bangkok or nearby areas.
Since then, no official has dared to question the possibility that Bad Things will happen. Rare as they may be, the furious rages of nature are always as close as a sudden attack by a psychotic ya ba addict. Not to mention they are far more dangerous.
There are lots of people working hard to detect and warn of such natural disasters - weather upheavals, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunami and the like. And these experts work in public, usually trying to educate an easily lulled population.
Earth Alerts software is both educational and useful. It tracks a wide host of weather and disaster alerts and localises them. It has the Bangkok weather forecast, but it also can tell you in minutes or even seconds when there is another under-sea earthquake like the 9.1 temblor that caused the 2004 tsunami.
Setting up the software is a wee bit obscure, but if you follow the directions on the post-installation page you should be all right. It’s best to set up a US location, as it recommends - use the ZIP code 90013 for Los Angeles if nothing else. Then click on the link to add a foreign alert zone, and simply type in Bangkok as your first addition.
The software takes some time to update information from a wide variety of sources, but once loaded with data it shows, for example, all the recent earthquakes that might affect Thailand, from the US Geographical Service.
You can set up Earth Alerts to run in the background, update itself and only let you know of a possible disaster - typhoon or earthquake, say.
There is a recent description of the program and a download link at the Earth Alerts home page at earthalerts.manyjourneys.com.
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