PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WPRI) - People in Providence will now be able to find out about emergencies through their computer. The City of Providence Monday launched its new FLASHbrief system.

The online emergency notification system provides instant alerts on their computer screens in the event of an emergency.

Once residents and businesses download the FLASHbrief program onto the computer, the Providence Emergency Management Agency will be able to send either emergency alerts for natural or man-made disasters or advisory alerts for street closures, parking bans and Amber Alerts.

"This new tool will provide our emergency response team with the ability to reach thousands of residents incredibly fast, with the click of the mouse," said PEMA Director Peter T. Gaynor. " FLASHbrief will be especially helpful to local businesses who must make important management decisions in the event of an emergency."

To get connected click here . Then enter ?Rhode Island?, ?Providence County? and ?Providence? in the appropriate fields and click ?download?. A FLASHbrief icon will appear on the lower, right-hand corner of the computer screen.

FLASHbrief, LLC is headquartered in Orlando, Florida and is comprised of software and network security experts, former military and federal and local law enforcement officials throughout the nation.

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One of four methods Virginia Tech uses to alert students and faculty in an emergency failed Thursday when school administrators attempted to warn the campus about reports of gunfire in a dorm, the university said.

This is the first time Virginia Tech has used its new emergency alert system since the April 16, 2007, massacre. That day, a student gunman killed 32 people and himself, and injured more than 20 others in a rampage that began in a dorm and ended in a classroom building.

ON DEADLINE: Updates on Virginia Tech's scare

A state report that analyzed the university's emergency response concluded that lives could have been saved if the university had notified students after the initial dorm room shooting and had locked down the campus.

University administrators on Thursday issued a first alert at 1:40 p.m. after Tech police responded to a report of gunfire near the Pritchard Hall dormitory, university spokesman Larry Hincker said.

Hincker said police believe that exploding cartridges from a nail gun in a trash bin caused what sounded to be gunfire. He said police believe that two people exploded the cartridge in the bin by slamming the lid.

As police searched the dorm, the university posted a message to the university Web page, e-mailed it campuswide, sent it to electronic message boards in classrooms and relayed it to the VT Alerts system, the school said. The VT Alerts system is designed to send a text or voice message to mobile devices such as cellphones.

The VT Alerts system failed to deliver some of the messages, the university said. Two other messages sent later Thursday afternoon to the VT Alerts system also failed, the school said. "The VT Alerts system did not perform as expected," the university said.

Tech officials said they have contacted the company that manages the system to determine why non-university accounts did not receive the text and voice messages.

The university tested its system on Oct. 8.

The company, Glendale, Calif.-based 3n, said it had experienced a disruption in service for about an hour and a half.

"We are conducting a thorough analysis and once we have more information, we will share it," said Cinta Putra, CEO of 3n.

Government officials have been quietly stepping up counterterror efforts out of a growing concern that al Qaeda or similar organizations might try to capitalize on the spate of extremely high-profile events in the coming months, sources tell ABC News.

Security experts point to next month's Olympics as evidence that high-profile events attract threats of terrorism, like the one issued this past weekend by a Chinese Muslim minority group that warned of its intent to attack the Games.

Anti-terror officials in the U.S. cite this summer and fall's lineup of two major political parties' conventions, November's general election and months of transition into a new presidential administration as cause for heightened awareness and action.

This is what the Department of Homeland Security is quietly declaring a Period of Heightened Alert, or POHA, a time frame when terrorists may have more incentive to attack.

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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Cell phone users will get text message alerts of emergencies under a new nationwide alert system approved late Wednesday by the Federal Communications Commission, according to FCC spokesman Robert Kenny. An emergency text message would be sent in the event of a widespread disaster, severe weather or child abduction. Under the plan, the FCC will appoint a federal agency to create the messages and pass them on to cell phone companies that choose to participate, an FCC representative said earlier. Once that agency is named, the participating cell phone providers would have 10 months to comply with the new system's requirements.

"It is essential that we support and advance new ways to share critical, time-sensitive information with them in times of crisis," FCC chairman Kevin J. Martin said in a written statement.

Earlier, the FCC representative explained how the plan would work. Cell phone companies that voluntarily opt into the system would send text-based alert messages to subscribers in response to three types of events:

• A disaster that could jeopardize the health and safety of Americans, such as a terrorist attack; these would trigger a national alert from the president of the United States
• Imminent or ongoing threats such as hurricanes, tornadoes or earthquakes
• Child abductions or Amber alerts.

T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint Nextel and AT&T all stated that they would be likely to opt into the alert system if it is passed by the FCC.

"While we obviously need to review the details of the FCC's decision, we look forward to offering mobile emergency alerts to our customers," AT&T said in a written statement.

A Sprint representative said the company would participate if the FCC adopts the plan exactly as it was recommended by an advisory group.

A federal agency, yet to be appointed, would create the messages and information that would go to the participating cell phone companies, an FCC spokesman said. Once that agency is named, all carriers that opt into the system will have to meet the requirements of the system within 10 months.

Subscribers would be able to opt out of receiving the messages, according to the current plan, and carriers would be required to provide vibration or audio attention signals with a distinct sound for people with disabilities.

The alert system plan was generated from an act Congress passed in 2006 that looked at emergency communications. The act directed the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, the FCC and other agencies to work together to enhance and expand the capabilities of emergency communications in the United States.

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DES MOINES, Iowa (Reuters) - A tornado roared through a Boy Scout camp in Iowa and flattened a cabin where many campers had sought shelter, killing four teen-aged boys and injuring dozens of others.

Close to 100 Boy Scouts scrambled for safety in shelters at the Little Sioux Scout Ranch when the tornado hit on Wednesday evening, one of more than 30 twisters that ripped across the U.S. Midwest into the night.

"We had no warning really at all," scout leader Thomas White said on Thursday morning. He said scouts were watching the clouds and the lightning storm when they saw a funnel form in the sky and began to run.

One cabin where scouts sought shelter was in the path of the tornado, and White said in television interviews that was where the boys died.

"It hit and all the doors flew open and it popped my ears," Rob Logsdon, 15, said. "The walls and the porch and the roof just disappeared. I got hit by a table in the back."

The boys killed at the camp were identified as two 13-year-olds and one 14-year-old from nearby Omaha, Nebraska, along with a 13-year-old from Eagle Grove, Iowa.

At least two tornado warnings were issued for Little Sioux before the twister struck on Wednesday evening.

Hal Emas, 14, said 40 boys huddled in one shelter when a siren blared and the scout leader shouted "under the table!" "Two seconds later, the walls blew out. It lasted for about 10 seconds," he told the Des Moines Register.

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Officials have called for help to shore up sandbagged levees in Iowa, following heavy rain that has caused serious flooding across the US Midwest.

Thousands of volunteers stacked sandbags by rivers in Cedar Falls and Iowa City on Tuesday, as officials sought to prevent them overflowing.

More thunderstorms are forecast this week, posing the threat of more rain.

Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama cancelled a planned trip to Iowa because of the floods.

Several days of severe weather have caused rivers to burst their banks, reservoirs to spill over and towns to be inundated in several states.

Dozens of people were forced from their homes in eastern Illinois on Tuesday when levees failed on the Wabash and Embarras rivers, flooding large areas of farmland.

'Critical point'

In Cedar Falls, the brimming Cedar River had been expected to spill over a levee into the city overnight but officials said the barrier appeared to be holding early on Wednesday.

Flooded farm in Illinois, 10 June. Large areas of farmland flooded after levees breached in Illinois.

City spokeswoman Susan Staudt praised the efforts of volunteers who had piled up tens of thousands of sandbags, saying their efforts had "saved this city, but we are still at a critical point", the Associated Press reported.

The city of 35,000 was evacuated on Tuesday, with sandbags stacked in the streets and tarpaulins taped to windows to protect homes from flooding.

In Iowa City, university students piled sandbags along the Iowa River in a bid to protect their campus from flooding.

Residents of the town of Elnora, in Indiana, were also relying on sandbags and concrete barriers to hold back the White River.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels said the state was suffering its worst flooding since the 19th Century.

"There's widespread damage, there's a lot of water where it shouldn't be, there are a lot of homes that have been damaged or destroyed," said Homeland Security spokesman John Erikson, quoted by Reuters news agency.

In Minnesota, Governor Tim Pawlenty declared a state of emergency in two counties affected by flooding on Tuesday.

Officials from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (Fema) are due to begin visiting flood-hit areas on Thursday.

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SACRAMENTO – Wind-driven wildfires raked Northern California for a second day Wednesday, including a raging forest fire that forced hundreds to evacuate in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

The Santa Cruz fire flared just two weeks after another blaze two miles away scorched 4,200 acres and destroyed at least three dozen homes. Late Wednesday, mandatory evacuations were ordered for 500 residents in the heavily forested hills. Voluntary evacuations were in place for another 1,000 residents.

The fast-moving fire in the Bonny Doon area grew to more than 300 acres shortly after it broke out about 3 p.m. It could spread to as many as 1,000 acres before firefighters are able to slow down the flames, Battalion Chief Paul Van Gerwen said.

Hot temperatures, steady winds and tinder-dry vegetation created conditions exactly like those that fed the earlier blaze.

Those conditions also prevailed throughout the rest of Northern California, where hundreds of firefighters were deployed on fire lines from the North Coast wine country to the Central Valley.

For a second day, erratic wind gusts surprised firefighters who were overrun by flames. Three firefighters were burned near Lincoln, about 35 miles northeast of Sacramento, when they were caught in a 65-acre grass fire burning in a dry rice field. Two of them had moderate to severe burns to their faces and arms, while the third was released from a hospital after treatment for minor facial burns.

The fire unexpectedly changed direction, trapping the firefighters and destroying two fire engines, said Bill Mendonca, battalion chief for the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection.

Two are career firefighters from the state fire agency, while the third is a volunteer with the Placer County Fire Department. All three were taken to the University of California, Davis Medical Center regional burn center in Sacramento.

The burn center also was treating a 21-year veteran of the Sacramento Metro Fire Department who was injured on Tuesday while trying to protect a mobile home near a grass fire southeast of Sacramento.

“He's conscious, he's alert, his spirits are good,” Capt. Jeff Lynch, a spokesman for the department, said after surgery on the firefighter. “It's going to be several months of surgeries, rehabilitation.”

The captain suffered third-degree burns to his hands and second-degree burns to his arms. His two crew members were able to get inside their fire engine and escaped injury.

The injuries to four firefighters in less than 24 hours show just how fast and dangerous wind-whipped grass fires can be, said experts in fire behavior.

Those fires can give firefighters less time to react to sudden changes in wind direction, said Larry Hood, a fire behavior analyst with the U.S. Forest Service. Unlike brush or trees, the dead grass that carpets California's Central Valley after spring also responds to even the slightest drop in humidity.

“With those light, airy fuels, the fire behavior can change in a second,” Hood said.

This week's hot, dry north wind, gusting to 40 mph, turns the grass to tinder and can send embers sailing far ahead of the main fire. Flames, even in grass just a foot tall, can reach 4 to 6 feet high.

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ONEW PORT RICHEY - "Hurricane Complacency" are two words that just never will go together, Pasco County emergency officials say.

"Complacency is the single word" to describe reactions of West Pasco residents, said James Martin, the county's emergency management director.

"Don't wait for the storm to form" could serve as a motto for people to prepare. "Get a plan!"

OThat was the advice on the Pasco Emergency Management Web site, at which a timer ticked down to the June 1 start of the Atlantic hurricane season, which continues through Nov. 30.

"Current hurricane predictions indicate a heightened year for tropical storm development," the Web site advises online visitors.

Concern among West Pasco residents largely blew over after the tumultuous 2004 season, when four hurricanes threatened the area within six weeks. The 2005 season ushered in Hurricane Katrina and another round of big storms.

But the rate of storms heading this way died down in 2006 and 2007, Martin observed. Time is wasting for residents to stock up on emergency supplies and work out their own personal evacuation plans.

They should learn the evacuation zone for their neighborhoods. Those zones are A through E. People in A zones would have to evacuate even during the least intense hurricanes.

The zones have remained the same this year.

County evacuation shelters at area schools are a last resort, officials emphasize.

Pasco this year has three more shelters for a total of 25, Martin reports. That means some 30,000 people could fit in those 25 shelters, figuring on 20 square feet per person.

In the direst emergency, the space per person might have to shrink to as little as 10 square feet - roughly one-tenth the space of a small bedroom.

The county practices what it preaches on preparation, officials say.

This week Pasco County emergency staff will take part in a statewide exercise, Martin pointed out. The drill will trace the often unpredictable route of a mock hurricane. More drills are planned throughout the stormy season.

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Disaster is bearing down on all sides of late. A ravaging cyclone in Burma. A killer earthquake in China. Even the United States hasn't escaped unscathed, with tornadoes ripping across the heartland and Southeast and floods rising in the mid-Atlantic.

Still, most Americans have been watching the devastation in Asia from relative safety and, if I had to guess, with a certain sense of complacency, a feeling that disaster on that scale isn't likely to happen to them. But it could. And if it did, our country might face the same sort of crisis as our Asian cousins. A major reason: The American public isn't prepared.

Even after Sept. 11, 2001, even after Hurricane Katrina, a Red Cross survey last year found that 93 percent of Americans aren't prepared for a major calamity — a natural disaster, a pandemic or a terrorist attack. This is troubling, because the more prepared a population is, the more effective the response to and recovery from a catastrophe will be.

In the weeks after 9/11, my worried wife asked me, "What should we be doing?" We lived directly across the street from the Manhattan hospital where a woman had just died from anthrax exposure; I worked only a couple of blocks from the World Trade Center.

Initially, I thought that the answer to her question would be pretty straightforward. But 6 and 1/2 years later, I'm still trying to pin it down.

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(CNN) -- The recent series of disasters in the United States and around the world have resulted in the forced evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and have again demonstrated with startling clarity that we are living in a new normal.

In this new normal, international interdependencies and instantaneous communications combine to constantly remind us of disaster and terrorism, and disasters that once were considered exceptional now occur more frequently. The recent earthquakes in China and the Myanmar cyclone are but two reminders of such disasters.

The reminders are beamed into our homes and workplaces as if to demonstrate that tragedy that can result if we fail to prepare. What people once viewed as the exception they now see on a routine basis, yet we still don't take the steps to be prepared for this new normal.

We have to be better prepared, and the first steps start at home and at work.

In today's densely populated and technologically dependent communities, disasters have a far greater impact than ever before. It's time for America to wake up to this reality.

In a world where natural and man-made disasters can and will happen with little or no warning, we need to be prepared. We face a host of potential disasters: from earthquakes, hurricanes and pandemics to industrial accidents, electrical blackouts, terrorism and the effects of possible attacks with weapons of mass destruction. Our task as Americans is to be ready.

At home, events after 9/11, Katrina, wildfires in California and Florida, numerous destructive tornadoes and other storms, and the threat of earthquakes accentuate the need to create a culture of preparedness in America.

A preparedness that is ingrained and intertwined in every part of our daily life, but is mostly common sense, is based in the American spirit. While it is the duty of local, state and federal governments to prepare for and respond to disaster, true preparedness begins in our homes and our neighborhoods.

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Authorities across the US Midwest braced for the possibility of new deadly tornadoes Monday, after at least eight people were killed when twisters swept through the region over the weekend.

CNN reported that seven people were found dead in the north-central Iowa towns of Parkersburg and New Hartford when a tornado passed at about 6:00 pm (2200 GMT) Sunday.

Marble-sized hail also fell over the town of Waterloo, Iowa where authorities reported significant damage to homes, trees and power lines, the report said.

Iowa Governor Chet Culver declared a state of disaster in three counties. Meanwhile, in Minnesota, a separate twister killed a two-year-old child and seriously injured nine other people in the Minneapolis-Saint Paul area, CNN said.

Weather watchers said that all told, there were some 160 reports of tornadoes spanning from Texas to Minnesota, and said new twisters were likely, possibly accompanied by hail, damaging wind and downpours.

Conditions in Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas were particularly propitious for new tornadoes, meteorologists said.

Governor Culver told Fox television that the disaster declaration "allows the local emergency assistance companies to get there faster.

"I am traveling through Parkersburg, (and) this devastation is amazing in its horribleness," said Culver, who said the southern half of the city was flattened.

"You have 200 homes, many of them completely gone. We are mobilizing some guardsmen to come in and try to help," said Culver.

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