After successfully launching the Google Public Alerts service in seven different countries, the U.S giant Google has now officially made the service available in our very own Indonesia. For you who have yet been familiar with the Google Public Alerts, it is sort of service that gives people precautions about upcoming earthquake or tsunami through their desktop or mobile devices.
Meryl Stone, the Head of Partnership of the Google Crisis Response, told us couple of days ago (22/9) that Indonesia is the first country in Southeast Asia region to implement this service, after series of countries in other regions like the U.S, Canada, Mexico, Colombia, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan.
The implementation of the service here in Indonesia would be greatly backed up by the National Center of Meteorology, Climatology, and Geo-physics (BMKG). Good news is, this collaboration of BMKG and Google knows no end, meaning that users may literally get access to real-time precautions anytime for their whole life.
“It’s been an honor for us (Google) to collaborate with the BMKG. While at the moment the service only covers precautions for earthquake and tsunami, we plan to expand its functions in no time, so that it may tell users about potential volcano eruption, flood, rock slides, and other harmful natural disasters as well,” Stone said.
Google Public Alerts combines three Google’s flagships at once: Google Search, Google Maps, and Google Now. The app allows users to look for happening natural disasters through its Google Search feature, and later get information about the type and location of disasters. Once it finds a disaster, the app will alert users by labelling the location with “tsunami” or “earthquake”.
“Google Public Alerts uses the most advanced algorithm which may classify information by itself. Such sophisticated algorithm won’t let the app alerting everyone everywhere. Rather, it would only warn those who are in need of the information,” Stone added.
Besides employing the mentioned method, users may also make use of the official website of Google Public Alerts Indonesia. There, users will look a complete map of Indonesia, along with a number of pins which represent the natural disaster’s locations. To get detailed information about the disaster, users only have to click on those pins, and they would get various useful and informative information, i.e the estimated time of the disaster’s arrival, height of the stream, and tips to save ourselves from the disaster.
Once users activate Google Now on their Android-based or iOS-based devices, Google will automatically push warning notifications via cards containing alerts and instruction to evacuate themselves to them should their location gets hit by any type of detected natural disaster.
Considering that a disaster will mostly hit and harm the infrastructures of impacted locations, in which most of them would end up with the total shut down of electricity as well as internet connection within the area, the company has decided to partner with local operator Indosat to cover such unexpected event. Users only have to contact *123*77# from their own cellphones to get fast responses from the telecom’s representatives.
[Header: DailySocial]
