Senate to back bill requiring telcos to send disaster alerts
SENATE President Franklin Drilon yesterday committed the support of the entire Senate for a House bill authored by leftist lawmakers seeking to compel telecommunication companies to send free mobile alerts warning of impending natural and even manmade disasters.
Drilon went a step further than House Bill 353, introducing an amendment to penalize telcos that fail or refuse to send such mobile alerts with fines ranging from P1 million to P10 million or with the revocation of their franchises.
HB 353 was authored in the House of Representatives by party-list Representatives Neri Colmenares and Carlos Isagani Zarate (Bayan Muna).
The alerts would consist of “updated information from the relevant agencies, and shall be sent directly to the mobile phone subscribers located near and within the affected areas.”
House bill endorsed
Drilon said the Senate committee on public services chaired by Sen. Ramon Revilla Jr. has already favorably endorsed HB 353 with the amendments that he had introduced.
He stressed the importance for the bill to pass, citing the 2012 World Disaster Report that ranked the Philippines third among all countries which recorded the highest exposure to natural calamities.
“Having been ranked as the third most disaster-prone country in the world, it is imperative for the Philippines to put up a mechanism to efficiently disseminate early warnings of typhoons,” Drilon said in a statement.
He said sending out text-message alerts through mobile phones “could be the most efficient tool in sending out disaster warnings given the fact that the Philippines recorded the highest number of cellular phone users in the world.”
Citing a study by Business Monitor International, Drilon said the Philippines is expected to have 117 million mobile subscribers by 2016.
“As the texting capital of the world, we can greatly use the instantaneous, flexible and reliable short message service [SMS] technology as a potent tool during disaster situations, one that is intimately understood and easily accessed by millions of Filipinos who have cell phones,” Drilon said.
He said telcos were “cooperative toward the passage of the bill,” based on what National Telecommunications Commission Commissioner Gamaliel Cordoba said at a Senate committee hearing that the proposed measure “sits well with the telephone companies, as sending out text-message disaster alerts does not require additional costs on their operations.”