Could an iPhone save your life?

Countless numbers of people die every year thanks to mother nature, or other unexpected events. How many of those people could have survived had they received critical information in a timely fashion? Sadly many people with the opportunity to keep themselves informed choose not to. For example, severe weather can bring floods, tornadoes, lightning, and a host of other life threatening conditions.

Some people don't want to be bothered with keeping an ear on a weather radio, the news, etc. So why not take a moment to install some apps that can send you notifications if there is something going on in your neck of the woods? Once these apps are set up you can move on with your life and if something goes down you will hopefully be informed about it.

On my iPhone I have an "Alerts" folder where I keep my current collection of apps that send me various types of alerts.

My iPhone Alerts folder.

As you can see in the image above I currently have four applications. There is POM Alert, Boxcar, WeatherAlert, and Quake Alert. Some of these apps are for curiosity more than anything else. I don't live in an earthquake prone area, but it's interesting to be notified when there is a large quake in another part of the world.

When it comes to an app that may be the most likely to save someone's life it would probably be WeatherAlert. Within this app you can select from a slew of weather events to be notified about. I personally choose to receive them all, but sometimes you get multiple warnings about the same event, like a heat advisory. If certain events aren't important to you, simply disable them. This app is location based, so be sure to set it to the location you are currently in.

Another interesting notification app is POM Alert. This will alert you to a variety of different things, from a registered sex offender moving into your area, to Homeland Security updates.

As you can see in the image above, you can also receive alerts pertaining to Disease Control, earthquakes, weather, traffic, wildfires, FEMA, and volcanoes. This app is also location based. I would be surprised if I ever got a volcano warning, but you never know!

Quake Alert is more for my own curiosity, but it maybe useful for someone who lives in an earthquake prone region, and life saving if you are vulnerable to tsunamis. It also includes a form you can fill out if you experienced and earthquake to help give information to the earthquake center.

As seen above, you can register to receive notifications when there is an earthquake that meets the criteria you specified. You can choose the distance and the magnitude of the earthquake you would like to be alerted about. I just set it to the max distance and anything over a 5.0. I have already received multiple alerts within hours of installing it. I may up it to 6.0, which is the max, to reduce notifications. The interesting thing is just tonight a major quake happened and I got a notification about it from this app before the media sent out their alerts.

Above you can see there was a magnitude 7.5 earthquake near Vanuatu. It triggered a small tsunami. If I lived in this region, and could get service, I would have received alerts about this event and I would be able to take the appropriate action.

Then there is Boxcar, which can notify you about Twitter happenings, RSS feeds, etc.

I use this app to alert me to a variety of happenings on Twitter from mentions to specific keywords. You can also use it to monitor activity on your Facebook and RSS feeds. For example, I set up a Google News alert for my home town. If there are any news articles posted that mention my town Boxcar will notify me when they show up in the RSS feed the Google News alert generates. 

While these may not all be life saving alerts, they do help keep me informed to what's going on in my area.

If anyone uses any other apps like these, that they would recommend, please leave a comment.