Emergency Notifications
Emergency Notifications are critical for everyone, but most people don’t think about them until an incident is directly affecting them!
Gallatin County utilizes multiple types and approaches to emergency notifications to give the best penetration into our communities and their varied connectivity and preferences. However, to ensure the highest level of certainty you’ll receive a notification, follow the 3 steps below.
1 Register in our Community Notification System (powered by Everbridge).
Registering in our Community Notification System allows you to tell us how you want to be notified (i.e. cell phone, email, etc…) and the locations you care about (i.e. home, parents, work, etc…). This is information we don’t know unless you tell us. By registering, you will receive notifications about incidents affecting those locations regardless of if you are physically at them.
2 Download the Everbridge App for your phone.
Downloading the app allows you to receive notifications based on your current location. This covers when you are not at a pre-identified location, but happen to be someplace affected by an incident. You can also log into the app with the account you created in Step 1 and receive notifications for your registered locations, but the big value of the app is being alerted based on your current location.
3 Ensure Emergency Alerts are enabled on your phone.
Wireless Emergency Alerts allows us to send messages directly to cellular phones in a “somewhat” defined area with no need for them to do anything (essentially it goes to every phone in the area). Sometime people have turned this capability off in their phones, please make sure this is enabled. Please note that Wireless Emergency Alerts is a very complex technology that is constantly evolving, but far from perfect. It tends to alert a much larger area then identified and not every phone always goes off, but it is still a fabulous tool for incidents with a major threat to lives.
- Open Settings
- Open Notifications
- Scroll all the way to the bottom where it says “Government Alerts”
- Ensure both “Emergency Alerts” and “Public Safety Alerts” are turned on
- Open Settings
- Open Safety and emergency
- Open Wireless Emergency Alerts
- Turn on “Extreme Threats”, “Severe Threats” and “Public Safety Messages”
