An Earthquake hit the South Pacific near an island nation of Vanuatu early Thursday morning. There are no early reports of casualties, damage or impending tsunamis. But it raises an interesting question about the potential of information technology to help when disaster strikes.

When it comes to mobile GSM technology, Asia is generally considered light years ahead of North America. Could it be possible to assemble a South Pacific SMS emergency warning system?

The city of San Francisco CA has a unique SMS Earthquake alert system. Sign up with the local government and your cell phone will get a text warning of impending doom. It’s an emergency response warning not limited to earthquakes; it’ll also warn of impending flood, fire or zombie attacks.

At least one Asian nation has tried something like it. Sri Lanka has (or perhaps had) just such a system in place. After the last tsunami, Sri Lanka implemented the Alert Retrieval Cache. It seemed to have been a bust because none of the links to the program work anymore, but that’s probably for the best. Although it’s a great idea to have an SMS emergency text system in place, the design needs to be carefully thought out.

The Alert Retrieval Cache system seemed to go about it the wrong way. Instead of a trusted central body controlling all the cell phone numbers, this system was a directory listing of phone numbers. It must have been peppered with spam to the point of being shut down.

With the relative success of the San Francisco scheme, though, we might yet see such a program working across nations of Asia’s South Pacific, including Vanuatu, in the not too distant future.

Hopefully before the next natural disaster.