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Sending emergency notifications is a complex topic for emergency officials, and not a topic we take lightly.  Below we’ll talk about some of the available tools, the benefits and challenges of each, and what you can do to ensure you receive emergency information.

The first challenge is determining if an incident is appropriate for an emergency message, and if so, which tools to use.  Every person in our community has their own opinion on what is appropriate and preferences on what types of devices they utilize.  Basically we are saying there is no single approach that reaches everyone and typically someone is upset that they got an alert, or upset they didn’t get one and felt they should.  So, we utilize the available tools listed below in a combination to best reach those affected by a given incident.

The ultimate guarantee of receiving emergency notifications is for you to register in the Community Notification System and also download the app.

Emergency Alert System

The Emergency Alert System (EAS) has been around for many decades in several forms and names.  This is the weird noise you hear on television and radio accompanied by a scroller and voice message.  EAS is an effective tool to reach everyone listening to a radio or television, but less effective than in the past with more people utilizing streaming services.  The challenges with EAS are that people must have a television or radio turned on to receive the message (people with NOAA weather radios can set them to alert for an EAS message).  The smallest area we can alert with this method is the entire county, making it hard to utilize for incidents affecting small geographic areas.

Voice Telephone Calls

We have several ways we can generate automated voice telephone calls.  One is with data derived from landline and VOIP phones that are tied to physical addresses.  The other is from individuals who have registered in our Community Notification System.  Voice calls can be very effective for notifying commercial facilities, areas with limited cellular coverage, or when people are asleep.  The number one challenge with voice calls is the physical time for delivery is long and can overwhelm the phone system in the affected area (we have to throttle our call rate to not crash the local phone system).  Next is the reality that many people no longer have land line phones, or if they do, they don’t use them and assume anyone calling is a telemarketer.  This leads to people often not answer calls from numbers they don’t recognize.  The only way for us to call cellular phones is for people to register in the Community Notification System (and if you happen to still have a fax machine, we can also send you a fax).

Text Messages

We can send text messages to individuals who have registered in the Community Notification System.  Text messages can be highly effective and are reliably read by individuals, but in large incidents where the cellular system is overloaded they can be heavily delayed to the point they are too late.

Emails

We can send emails to people who have registered in the Community Notification System.  Emails are highly effective in their ability to support very complete messages (we can pout more detail), include attachments and hit a lot of people quickly.  The downside is they may require someone looking at a device to see the message, are also subject to delays with overloaded communications systems in a large incident and can sometimes get caught in spam filters.

Apps

You can download the Everbridge App to receive notifications directly based on your current location (or registered locations) with or without registering in the Community Notification System.  The app is similar to a marriage of text messages and emails in that messages are fast and can support added detail and attachments.  However the app also has the same challenge with being subject to overloaded communications systems.  There are several third party apps that may pull our emergency messages from public feeds and also display them within their apps too.

Wireless Emergency Alerts

Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) are a relatively new player and have a lot of potential for incidents with an imminent life threat, but currently have significant tradeoffs.  There are a couple classifications of WEA, with AMBER Alerts being the one you are most likely to have seen.  As a very broad generalization, when we generate a WEA we define an alerting area and create a compliant text message, this is sent to cellular carriers and they pass the message directly to cellular phones on their network that they think are inside the defined alerting area.  The alerts generate a unique alert tone, pop up on your phone, does not require registration, and are not affected by cellular network congestion (they seem like a text message, but are much different).  Here are the challenges, which continue to diminish as the system matures.  Each cellular provider uses different approaches on how they determine what phones are in the alerting area and there can be significant overage on who gets alerted.  The smallest physical alerting area we can draw is somewhere around .5 miles by .5 miles and it is very common to see devices alerted up to 10 miles beyond the defined area.  Additionally, the size of the message we can send is limited to 90 characters on older devices and 360 on newer devices.  It is hard to accurately describe what is going on, who it applies to, what they are to do, and where they can get more information in 360 characters, let alone 90.  So a great tool, but tricky to send a clear message and focus the distribution to a small area.

Other Distribution

We also strive to distribute messaging about an incident through the popular social media sources in the affected area, but that can sometimes take time to contact the right people who can make those posts.  We have also utilized tools like NextDoor in areas with established subscriber bases or Facebook Local Alerts.  We will also generate a media release for most of these incidents, but many of our media outlets do not have 24/7 reporter coverage and may be delayed in their distribution of the information.

Summary

There is not a one stop shop for emergency alerting and we always strive to use the right tools for any given incident.  The best recommendation we can give that provides the best guarantee of you receiving emergency notifications for an incident affecting you, is to register in the Community Notification System.  When you register, you will tell us how you want to be notified and what locations you care about.  This allows us to very accurately target our messages and ensure those who need the message get it directly.