First of all, the Water Bureau says it’s safe to drink your tap water again. But this weekend’s E. coli scare prompted Mayor Sam Adams to propose a new idea that’s sure to be controversial: creating a mandatory database of all Portlanders’ cell phone numbers, so that the city could contact all citizens immediately in an emergency.
In a 5 pm press conference this afternoon, Mayor Adams, Commissioner Randy Leonard and representatives from the Water Bureau and Multnomah County health department announced that “it is absolutely safe to drink Portland’s water.” Testing in 23 places this weekend revealed no E. coli traces left in Portland’s water. “We have the best drinking water in the world and the best safeguards to protect our drinking water,” said Leonard, suggesting that for extra precaution, Westsiders run their taps for two minutes before using the water.
But though Adams and Leonard told reporters at the conference that this weekend’s scare “shows that we have a system in place here that works” for emergencies, the Mayor said the city must create a secure database of citizen cell phone numbers so everyone in Portland could be contacted quickly. “This changeover has to happen. This event and last year’s inclement weather event shows for the need for us all to do that.” Noting that many Portlanders would go out of their way to sign up for a voluntary database, Adams suggested fines or other penalties for people who don’t let the city put their numbers on file any violation of the privacy of the database. UPDATE 11/30: They mayor called to clarify that he does not support fining people who would not sign up for the cell phone database, but instead meant that the penalties would be levied against anyone who breaches the privacy of the service. “People will not volunteer to share their info if they don’t know it’s going to be protected,” says Adams. That makes the emergency database more voluntary than I originally thought. /end update
Adams recalled that he phoned his mom this afternoon to say he would not be able to make it for dinner at her Eastside home tonight. She asked why. “She didn’t know about the contamination. She doesn’t watch TV particularly and she didn’t know,” says Adams, who added that the idea also stems from cut backs in media that make city reliance on TV and print reporters widespread publicity of city announcements less feasible.
Adams elaborated that he has been contemplating pushing for an emergency-contact database like this since last winter’s snowpoclaypse. “I absolutely respect and understand people’s concerns about privacy, but we gotta have it,” said Adams. “The public is desperate for clear information.” Adams also wants to create a “one stop shop” website that would post all official service disruption notices for big public and private groups like Portland Public Schools, TriMet and PGE. The beta version of this website, PublicAlerts.org, is already up.
Several questioned why the if E. coli was found on Wednesday and confirmed in a second test Friday (edit: the results of that test did not come back until Saturday), the City did not notify the public until Saturday afternoon. Water Bureau Administrator David Shaff said his group had followed Environmental Protection Agency regulation, noting that the water samples take 24 hours to test. “What our history says and what the rule says is that it’s not necessary to alert people after first specimen,” said Shaff.
Why is portalnd cursed with this during holiday weekends? I kinda wanted Adams to interrupt my TPS report due Monday.
It’s 503 502 2106.
That’s yours, right Matt? Do you have Sam Adams personal cell number? Please post it here. In case someone has an emergency, we might need to call him.
Also note that if you DID NOT want Sam Adams or his underlings to call you, you could just let him know that he is not allowed to call you and it would be a crime for them to call you.
See Oregon Revised Statute 166.090:
166.090 Telephonic harassment. (1) A telephone caller commits the crime of telephonic harassment if the caller intentionally harasses or annoys another person:
(a) By causing the telephone of the other person to ring, such caller having no communicative purpose;
(b) By causing such other person’s telephone to ring, knowing that the caller has been forbidden from so doing by a person exercising lawful authority over the receiving telephone; or
(c) By sending to, or leaving at, the other person’s telephone a text message, voice mail or any other message, knowing that the caller has been forbidden from so doing by a person exercising lawful authority over the receiving telephone.
How would you even begin to enforce something like this? How can the city know who has a cellphone?
Kyle,
It seemed to me from what Adams said that he envisions a database that lists a contact number for every residence. A land line could qualify, but he stressed the cell phone angle.
Wait…people still have land lines?
Wouldn’t people without cell phones be the most likely not to hear about something like this?
Are “fines and penalties” really necessary? If someone doesn’t want to opt-in to the city database, so be it.
So they can fine and penalize me for not having a cell phone or landline? I’ll give them a VOIP number thank you very much!
Number six: I don’t see how an automated emergency phone call from the city qualifies as illegal based on what you posted. Did you actually read the text of ORS 166.090?
1. Intentional harrasment or annoyance? I wouldn’t call it that. Unless you consider it annoying to be informed that you could be poisoned by your tap water.
a. No communicative purpose? I’m pretty sure communication is the whole point.
b & c. Forbidden from calling or texting by someone with authority over the receiving phone? Sounds like the “do not call list,” and I don’t think it should apply in an emergency situation.
I believe they do this in Europe for some things. The reason they like cell phones is that you don’t have to robodial or anything, you can just send out a city wide text “Water is bad, turn on a TV for more information.”
It’s a pretty efficient system if it’s used correctly. Lots of people disconnect during the weekend, and you don’t want them clogging up emergency rooms just because they didn’t check their Twitter.
I am glad to see so many people are willing to have government intrusion into their lives. Did everyone miss the part about mandatory. Has privacy lost all meaning?
Old Town
Whiner #1: The city didn’t do a good enough job informing the city about the shitty water!
Whiner #2: How dare the city try to learn my phone number in order to do a better job informing me about shitty water!
^^^(a summary of the comments thread)
FYI but Portland State has a similar emergency cellphone database. It’s not mandatory, but I would consider myself as one more concerned than most about privacy, and have signed up for it, as well as recommend that most my students do as well. So far I have received some helpful info about bomb threats in the Library, and thus far have not gotten any drunk text messages from academic admins.
Sure they’ve got my cell number, but not everyone is out to get you.
This is stupid. All they have to do instead is setup an emergency use only city twitter account and within minutes the whole city would know as people would re-tweet, update their FB statuses, and call those that are close to them.
Adams really just wants a system with the cellphone numbers of hot teenagers who live close by. This way it eliminates any middle men the next time he has an emergency and needs to call someone.
All Adams slamming aside… would minors have to give their numbers? Would the numbers be the billing address of the owner? What about business cell phones?
The twitter idea sounds so much better and cheaper (as in free). Though now the idea has been posted… wanna take bets that Adams claims it as his own?
I love the whiners about privacy. Your privacy was signed away the minute you purchased a contract with a cell carrier OR landline telco. The government already records conversations, e-mails, everything. This isn’t paranoid, this is admitted by the NSA for many years now:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/20…
Of all the things people whine about…
I hope the list is public record. We’ll be requesting and publishing it in its entirety.
There are a whole series of standards and industry activities to create a mobile emergency alert system. They take into account visitors to the geo. It would be foolish for Portland to do a one-of-a-kind system.
The solution here is for Sam to call his mom more often. You can have my cell phone number when you pry it from my cold dead fingers!
@sgtgrumbles – The fact that you “don’t think it should apply” is not a standard for evaluating a statue. The statute is pretty clear- if the owner of a phone says to person X “Do not make this phone ring” it is a crime for person X to make the phone ring.
Why don’t they just take the time and energy they would invest in making this list, and invest it in keeping dookie out of our water?
I don’t have a television and disconnect from the internet for most of the weekend so I didn’t know about the poop water until Sunday. I live on the East side so it wasn’t a big deal. I’m on the PSU text alert system and I would put myself on a city list but I think it should be voluntary.
“Why don’t they just take the time and energy they would invest in making this list, and invest it in keeping dookie out of our water?”
Perhaps because they cannot account for any and every potential emergency in the water system? No government entity can–covered reservoirs or not–period.
Maybe they’re just not trying hard enough. I believe in them! Wait… no I don’t.
Instead of a database of numbers, can’t they just do it at all the cell towers in the city? That way you get visitors from out of town, and don’t get people that are out of town, (which there were both quite a few of this weekend.) The cell phone companies already have a database of what phone numbers are connected to what towers, (they use it to route calls.) Ideally the cell phone companies should do this themselves anyways: If the city does it, they’ll tie up a lot of resources calling each person individually, where as the cell phone companies can send one message to each tower, and have the message broadcast to all people on the tower. They can also do it to landlines. Again, that is easy for the phone companies to do: Ring all non-leased wires that come into the central offices in the area. The other advantage of that is that you don’t have to call the entire city: If the problem is only on the westside, you only need to call the westside, and you can do that by just contacting the westside cell towers/COs.
The one problem with this list (regardless of how it is implemented,) is I can see it being used for more and more things, and people getting annoyed/not paying attention to them. For instance, boil water alerts are generally useful to everyone. But snowing and it may not be safe to drive and the bus system may be off schedule/not running at all? I can look out my windows and tell that. Amber alert? Great, if I’m doing something outside the house, not nearly as useful if it is black Friday and I’m celebrating by staying home. Crash on some location on I-5 and it is shut down for two hours? Awful if you are stuck in traffic in it, (worse if you are in the crash itself,) but less than 1% of the city would have used any given section of I-5 in those two hours even if it was open. While a database that allows you to opt in or out of certain types of notifications would be great, by definition they are emergencies and don’t always fit into neat little checkboxes. For instance: This is the first boil water order in 20 years.
Twitter is a great resource, AND IT WAS USED IN THIS EVENT, but no smart public office would choose to rely on a private company to get critical information out to citizens. Not everyone is on Twitter, you know, no matter how many followers @wilw has.
They already have my name, my income, my address, my drivers history, my utilities usage, and my garbage, for heavens sake, I’d totally sign up for an emergency text message.
Fuck you, Sam!