Though the severe line of storms that passed through the Golden Triangle last night did not spawn any tornadoes, it reminded Lowndes County E-911 Director Cindy Lawrence that having an extra layer of emergency notification for residents was necessary.
The only such notification in place right now is emergency sirens scattered across the county, but those aren’t always easy to hear, she said.
“Sirens were not made for people to hear inside their homes,” Lawrence said. “We always tell people that redundancy is very important. Even if you don’t have a weather radio, there’s still nothing wrong with you being able to get it on your cell phone or your land line.”
That’s why the county is mulling its options when it comes to purchasing a system that would automatically send out alerts to land lines and cell phones when people are in the path of a dangerous storm or other disaster.
County and city officials recently met with officials from the other six counties in the Golden Triangle Planning and Development District to learn more about a system called CodeRED, which takes a master database of numbers and addresses the planning and development district has and puts them on a map, GTPDD GIS coordinator Toby Sanford said.
“They put you on a map and they’re able to tell you when the weather service draws any of those polygons that they draw to tell you there is a tornado here and this is the direction it’s going,” Sanford said. “It tells you that you’re in the path. It doesn’t have to inform the entire county. It can inform the people that are going to be the most affected.”
Three seconds after the alert comes out, CodeRED is sending their messages to the phones in the affected area, Sanford added, and residents can also set it up to get notifications on social media accounts.
CodeRED offered to install its services for all seven counties GTDDP serves for $37,500, which would have been 21 cents for each of the area’s 177,627 people, Sanford said.
“GTPDD doesn’t have a dog in the hunt but we are here to bring savings to the counties we service,” he said. “They brought it to us and said they could bring this to all seven counties.”
Oktibbeha already has system
Jim Britt, Oktibbeha County E-911 Director, declined to participate because he said his county already has an effective system in AlertFM. In 2006, that provider was awarded the contract for the statewide alerting system. Britt said while his staff can notify people via phone of an upcoming emergency regardless of whether or not they have opted in to receive them, AlertFM works well because it notifies people through a message on their weather radio that they are in the path of a dangerous storm.
“They all pretty much do the same thing except I did not want to be totally dependent on the public telephone network,” Britt said. “When it gets busy, especially when you’ve got storms, phone lines really get tied up. It really doesn’t matter how many alerts a vendor can push out there at one time. It’s how much your local telephone network can handle. AlertFM operates off the sideband carrier of FM radio stations, so that gives us some more redundancy.”
Since AlertFM is compatible with the statewide alert system, Oktibbeha residents still get the information they need even if the local system goes down, Britt added. The county paid a one-time fee of about $15,000 using grant money to partner with AlertFM nearly 10 years ago, he said.
While Lawrence and Britt said they were both pleased with CodeRED, Lawrence said she’s trying to get more information about similar systems, while Britt said there was no need for him to ask the county for more money for an extra system.
“I just don’t know that we would need another one that’s already doing what we’re doing,” Britt said. “We’ve got one plus we’ve got other means to notify the public. If I did not already have an alerting system and could afford it, I would seriously consider getting CodeRED.”
Nathan Gregory covers city and county government for The Dispatch.
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