My partner, Carol, sent me an email message that’s making the rounds, which reads something as follows:

East Anglian Ambulance Service have launched a national “In case of Emergency (ICE)” campaign with the support of Falklands war hero Simon Weston and in association with Vodafone’s annual life savers award. The idea is that you store the word ” I C E ” in your mobile phone address book, and against it enter the number of the person you would want to be contacted “In Case of Emergency”. In an emergency situation ambulance and hospital staff will then be able to quickly find out who your next of kin are and be able to contact them. It’s so simple that everyone can do it. Please do. Please will you also forward this to everybody in your address book, it won’t take too many ‘forwards’ before everybody will know about this. It really could save your life. For more than one contact name ICE1, ICE2, ICE3 etc.

I did a little checking on this — is it just another urban legend? Apparently it’s for real, according to the Washington Post, as well as various urban legend Web sites.

Of course, it’s by no means foolproof. In an accident, your cell phone could be damaged, or the paramedics might not know how to operate your particular model of cell phone, and so on. (What is not true is that entering such information in your cell phone leaves you open to phone-based viruses.)

Yet it makes perfect sense to carry some sort of emergency contact information. Do I? No, I never thought of it before. But now that Carol sent me that email message, guess I’ll put that contact info in my cell phone, and maybe carry a card in my wallet, too. Hope you do the same (and get your kids to do it, too).