Hurricane Relief Teams Use MIR3's Notification

Five Disaster Medical Assistance Teams (DMAT) and ImpactWeather, a Houston-based provider of weather forecasting services, used MIR3's Intelligent Notification system in order to alert customers about the severity of Hurricane Katrina, or in DMAT's case, to gather, assemble and give deployment orders to DMAT members.  There are 29 DMAT teams in the National Disaster Medical System that provide assistance to local organizations in the event of major disasters and catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina.

ImpactWeather, which provides a variety of weather forecasting, alert, monitoring and notification services available 24/7, started notifying customers in the petroleum, manufacturing, energy and utility industries, located in areas between Beaumont, Texas and Florida, about the status of Hurricane Katrina, including wind speeds and estimated geographic impact points seven days before actual landfall. 

"We were able to utilize MIR3 as one method to reach out to our customers with text-to-speech notification alerts about Hurricane Katrina starting the week before it was due to make landfall," explained Mark Chambers, the president of ImpactWeather.  "We sent multiple alerts to our customers before communications were affected by the disaster in order to give them plenty of time to prepare for the event, which is necessary especially in the case of an oil refinery which could take days to shut down."

MIR3 allows designated individuals to send emergency communications to and from any device - such as landline, satellite and mobile phones, email, pagers, SMS, PDAs and fax - to individual recipients, groups or organization-wide with the click of a button.