Smart 911: Your Path to Safety in a Disaster

One of the enduring problems for people with disabilities who find themselves in an emergency or a disaster is the inability of the systems of emergency response to actually help them with the problems and threats they face. Once the emergency has occurred, it is too late to go through the complexities of your personal support system and health care needs. Response systems are largely operating on automatic during the early part of the emergency and they seem incapable of nuance.

Various registry approaches with, for example, power companies have been set up, but they all involve great practical difficulties in actual use not the least of which is the need for updating every time your needs in an emergency change.

There is a system out there that goes some way to reducing these barriers to safety in a disaster for our community. It is called smart911, and its purpose is to enable first responders to know what you need and want while they are responding. It is very flexible and allows for a wide variety of the kinds of preparation you can build with first responders. I would suggest that you work on it a little at a time so that you can more easily think through what you need.

You can start at the home site for smart911 at https://smart911.com/

I would scan the “How It Works” menu first. You can find out whether the service is part of your area by entering your zip code. You should also review the Security and Trust section, maybe several times over the period when you enter information. It can be daunting to fill out even if you know the information you are sharing could be crucial to your survival in an emergency.

I live in Ingham county and there is an active smart911 service here, so I have been working on filling our data in over the last week.

You can include just about anything you believe is important to your safety, even for pets and service animals.

Note that the information is only available after you call 911 during an emergency and only to first responders. Smart911 saves about 11 minutes per person in response, which is a lot of time in an emergency. And the info is only available for a short period of time. The service is very popular with users.

Take a look today. We all need support for emergency response.

“One of the things we fail to think about is the fact that when a person is dialing 9-1-1, it can be a very chaotic environment and there could be a lot of panic involved. If they have preloaded a profile that automatically populates for our responders, we have useful information, even if the person cannot relay all needed information to us.”