To expand the avenues through which New York residents are able to receive alerts about disasters and emergencies, the state is working with Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo — the makers of Xbox, PlayStation and Wii, respectively — to broadcast alerts over the vendors’ online gaming networks.

In January, Microsoft announced that it had sold 28 million Xbox consoles worldwide and its online gaming community, Xbox Live, had grown to more than 17 million members. To provide the ever-growing society of online gamers with a way to receive emergency alerts that doesn’t force them to quit their games, New York is interested in adding an option for people to add gaming networks as a way to receive emergency alerts from NY-Alert.

“We’ve been working with the vendors because we know there are a lot of people in the society — and not just necessarily adolescents or teenagers — but a lot of people are into these community games,” Dennis Michalski, spokesperson for the New York State Emergency Management Office.

NY-Alert is the state’s free, subscription-based alert and notification system. It’s a Web-based portal that allows state agencies, local governments, emergency service agencies and institutions of higher learning to provide emergency information to a defined audience. The official merely needs to type the message into the portal once and it’s disseminated to all the subscribers based on their preferred methods of receiving alerts. According to Michalski, NY-Alert allows officials to send alerts through 17 different gateways, including phone calls, text messages and e-mails.

“This is becoming a very mobile society,” Michalski said. “People just do not rely on sitting by their TV or radio waiting to hear the information through the emergency alert system.”

He said sending alerts through online gaming communities is currently being beta tested, but the state is hoping to go live with the option in the first quarter of 2010. Michalski emphasized that the alerts will be sent just to people who subscribe to them. “If you don’t invite us and you don’t register and include your gaming information, we cannot reach into your game and send any information across,” he said.

New York plans to add new options for alerting the public about emergencies as technology evolves. “We are going to explore every means of how we can disseminate and use these technologies people have to get information to them because disasters don’t occur nine to five, they’re nights and weekends,” Michalski said.

[Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/34396501@N00/ / CC BY 2.0.]