I just got a phone call from Stanford's emergency alert system on my cell phone and my office phone. It told me that there was a power outage on campus, and they didn't know when power would be restored. How is this an emergency? It's not Stanford Hospital. And any one on Stanford campus should be pretty darn aware there isn't power. I'm offsite, so our office has power.
Trying to think of who this would affect, and who would actually positively benefit from this seemingly bizarre utilization of resources... all I can think of is that if you are a researcher and you have experiments stored in a refrigerator, or are running something on a computer, but are actually offsite at the time, you'll want to know there's an outage so you can deal with it later. But then you'll probably want to know when the power comes back on. Or how long it's going to be....