Photo by kimberlyfaye.

Federal officials announced today that many smartphone users in Washington will receive alerts regarding “national or regional emergencies” — similar to those familiar Emergency Broadcast System television announcements — on their cell phones beginning by the end of the year. According to the New York Times, the service, which will also be installed in New York, will be available to those who have a special chip inside their phones and will pass along messages like “alerts issued by the president, information about public safety threats and Amber Alerts for missing children.”

Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile customers using certain models will get the alerts, and the system is location-specific, so D.C. residents who are traveling during an alert wouldn’t receive it. (Of course, one could argue that if something along the lines of the recent tornados in the South was happening around D.C., traveling residents would probably still like to know about it.) Officials are saying that the alerts will not be “frequent.”

The Times notes that customers will be able to opt-out of receiving the texts — except for the Presidential alerts. This is certainly good news for us in Washington, where there are any number of suspicious packages which could cause our phones to light up more frequently than even the most frequent Words With Friends player’s. And while the idea of the government being able to bombard citizen phones with notifications might not sound fantastic to some, it appears as if the system will be used exclusively for honest-to-god, citywide emergencies that people would really need to be informed of.

In D.C., the system might have the added bonus of improving the much-maligned AlertDC system — the federal alerts would be an enhancement to the existing framework, and we assume they will actually show up on time.