Green has found a faster way to deliver news about safety issues.
It’s called “Green Alert” and in addition to the standard automated telephone call to announce an emergency, it can use even faster text messaging to put the alert into your cell phone.
It is designed so a fire department shift commander can send the message from a smart phone from remote areas during fires or hazardous chemical spills.
“We hope to really get some good benefit for the whole city, to be able to use it for emergency notification to the citizens. And we have a couple different ways in which we do that,” said fire Capt. Jeff Funai.
Machines to make automated telephone calls are not new. Green previously used a program called WENS (Wireless Emergency Notification System) that was able to use numbers for land-line telephones. The problem with those systems is that they can be slow because they are limited by the capacity of the telephone system.
“A complaint that you sometimes see with these systems is that it’s bright and blue sky out again by the time [a resident gets] a phone call that says there’s a tornado coming and [they] need to get into the basement,” Funai said.
“We still need to test it, but we are virtually certain we will end up in the 10- to 12-minute range. That’s really good. [But] it’s still pretty slow for a tornado,
“We need it to be faster, so now that gets us to another part of the system, which is the wireless notification.”
One reason text messaging is so quick is it is terse.
“Text is the fastest because the data packet is the smallest,” Funai said. “It really can shoot it out there. So our limitation there is that it is only for those who opt in. On the voice call, if you have a registered phone number that is associated with the location, we can push a call there if you have opted in or not.”
Residents can sign up by going to www.cityofgreen.org/green-alerts-emergency-notification.
There, residents can be linked to up to five locations. Each person in a household should register his or her cell phone to get an alert.
Another advantage of a wireless system is that Green residents can receive the alert while working away from the land lines at home. So a woman could sign up for her own home and also the home of her elderly mother.
Residents can put a priority on the way they want to receive the first message —text, email or telephone call.
The message also can be targeted for specific neighborhoods. A fire department technician can draw a circle on a map at the fire station and send out an evacuation notice for those particular locations. Additional messages could be sent by a shift commander working at the scene.
Valerie Wolford, communications director for the city, said the system is just for safety issues.
“Are we going to send out a reminder that it’s FreedomFest tomorrow at 10? No,” she said. “We don’t want to junk it up with that kind of stuff. Now, let’s say it’s 9:45 at FreedomFest and a storm is rolling in and we want to clear out that field. Then we might say, ‘OK fireworks are canceled, storm is coming. Looks like the thunderstorm is going to hit in about 20 minutes, based on radar. Get to your cars.’ That would make sense because it is for safety.”
The first year under the contract with Everbridge cost the city $10,480. The next five years will cost $7,080 with a capacity of up to 12,000 households.
“If we max out on that, [it] would be fabulous,” Wolford said.
An introductory message will be sent out Sept. 17.
Dave Scott can be reached at 330-996-3577 or davescott@thebeaconjournal.com.