SANTA MONICA, Calif. — With 25% of cell phone towers down and power out in communities across the Eastern seaboard, city officials, emergency responders and insurance agents are among those relying on innovative communications technology — including the cloud telephony platform from CallFire — to help them deliver urgent messages to those most severely affected by Hurricane Sandy.
Municipal officials in Hamden, Conn., and Roseland, N.J., a local chapter of a New York volunteer ambulance company, and Allstate insurance agents stationed along the path of the hurricane are among those who have used CallFire’s Cloud Call Center, SMS text messaging and Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technologies to create and send more than 2.5 million messages about electrical outages, storm shelter locations and other urgent information. For the most part, cloud technology was simply not available when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005.
“It’s incredibly gratifying to have made a real difference in communities hit by Hurricane Sandy by providing local governments, first responders, insurance agents and others with the means of sharing vital, even lifesaving, information,” said Dinesh Ravishanker, CallFire CEO and co-founder. “Cloud telephony has transformed the ability to provide communications assistance on a massive scale. This kind of flexibility minimized disruptions to real time communications and enabled those charged with responding to this devastating event to perform their essential work.”
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