Storm Advice Offered for Florida Cell Phone Users

With Hurricane Danielle and Tropical Storm Earl roaming the Atlantic Ocean and signaling the start of the most active period of the 2010 storm season, Verizon Wireless urged Florida residents to prepare their emergency communication plans, and offered a few tips.

Verizon said residents with cell phones should:

• Keep wireless phone batteries fully charged – in case local power is lost – well before warnings are issued.
• Have additional charged batteries and car-charger adapters available for back-up power.
• Keep phones, batteries, chargers and other equipment in a dry, accessible location.
• Maintain a list of emergency phone numbers – police, fire, and rescue agencies; power companies; insurance providers; family, friends and co-workers; etc. – and program them into your phone.
• Distribute wireless phone numbers to family members and friends.
• Forward your home phone calls to your wireless number if you evacuate.

Once a storm begins to hit, Verizon said residents should generally keep down their time on the phone, and limit non-emergency calls to conserve battery power and free-up wireless networks for emergency agencies and operations.They also should send brief text messages rather than voice calls for the same reasons as above.

Floridians and others might also want to have phone applications they can use to check weather and news reports when power is out.

“We have prepared all year to make sure our services remain strong and available for customers to stay safe, connected and in command when any storm threatens,” said Pam Tope, Florida region president for Verizon Wireless, in a press release.

Those preparations have included building “Super Switch” call processing hubs in Florida designed to withstand Category 5 hurricanes, installing high-tech in-building systems at police, fire, health and other key emergency facilities across the state, and adding cell sites, more than 80 percent of which have their own back-up power; and many more initiatives.

Topics Florida Windstorm