Scoble touched on something today that's a little worrisome - not in and of itself, but in terms of trends:

When I interviewed the Twitter team yesterday I talked about its use during disasters. Well, looks like the Los Angeles Fire Department is using Twitter to tell people about what its department is doing.

For non-emergency notifications, that's fine. In a real disaster though, your net connection is probably going to go out early. Not because the net itself is unstable, but because your connection depends on power.

My wife brought this up with respect to VOIP phone service last night. A Comcast ad rolled by, and she paused it to look at the fine print - which mentioned something on the order of 5 hours of battery backup. That's great - unless the power drops while you're asleep. In the morning, you'll simply have no phone service.

With the huge numbers of people on cable/satellite TV, we have the same problem for emergency notifications - especially once the analog "over the air" broadcasts end (supposedly in 2009). Right now, you could hook a small TV up to backup power and see something. After that flip? Not at all. What about Cell phones? The service near my parent's place in Florida still isn't back to pre-2005 levels yet. With the wrong kind of disaster, the towers just go offline - and your phone's battery won't last that long anyway.

Radio is still there, of course, and battery powered radios are common - and a good thing too, because in a real emergency, radio is probably the only reliable way to get access to information. It's an interesting change from 20-30 years ago. We have lots and lots of additional communications channels, but in a real emergency, most of the new ones are very fragile at the edge, where people access them.