I was in Texas earlier this year and there was a big hullabaloo over some lone dispatcher in some tiny flyspeck town in some rural county that sent out an alert to every single phone in the state.

Tens of millions of people were woken up to be told to be on the lookout for someone 600 miles away.

My observation is that it's too easy for police to send out an alert. And in Texas it seems that alerts go out for every little thing that involves a cop. They don't even have to be searching for someone who killed a cop. It could just be someone who took off from a traffic stop, and suddenly every phone for 500 miles goes Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!

But when a chemical plant splurts out the largest chlorine leak in a decade, and a cloud of deadly gas sweeps over a few cities, it gets announced in a closed Facebook group.†

†This was in the Houston Chronicle earlier this week.