by Laura Walz [email protected] City of Powell River officials have installed a new emergency alerting system.
The city has contracted with One Call Now, a provider of group notification systems based in Troy, Ohio, to install an automated system that calls homes and businesses to contact them about emergencies or notifications. The system will also direct residents to take specific actions during an emergency.
Powell River Fire Rescue is using One Call Now Geo, a map-based system that can target calls to a specific neighbourhood, street or geographic area. In the event of an emergency, such as an evacuation order or a safety message for a specific area, the system can phone thousands of residents within minutes.
“It can extend beyond what we would consider emergencies, like disasters, to the more common, everyday sorts of emergencies,” said Dan Ouellette, director of fire and emergency services. “For instance, if we have a natural gas leak, instead of us going to every door and banging on it, we can use this system to alert people within a given block or the area that we thought to be of danger and have them moved to a different location. That’s very helpful for us, because we don’t have a lot of staff to bang on doors.”
Other city departments can benefit from the system as well, including public works, said Ouellette. “If there is a water main break, information can be given to people in a geographic area from them as well,” he said.
The system is map-driven, Ouellette said, and officials determine the area. “We essentially have a map of the community and we can draw a box around an area, for instance, two square blocks in a given location. Once we do that, we record a message and from the computer, we just hit send. It will send it to that whole area and it won’t send it to what we haven’t identified. Conversely, we can send it to every phone number within our city boundaries.”
Phone numbers, both residential and business, are obtained through telecommunication companies. The only phone numbers that are available are landlines, at this time. The system doesn’t allow registration of additional numbers, such as for cell phones
The system is also used to alert the city’s own staff, including off-duty firefighters, emergency social services personnel, and search and rescue groups, Ouellette said. Before the new system, those people carried a pager, he added, which meant the city had to activate a phone number. “There were quite extensive costs associated with that and equipment problems.”
When officials looked for a different and better way to contact people, they found the community alerting system allowed them to do that and it cost only about $1,000 a year more, Ouellette said. “At the end of the day, we found this was more efficient,” he said. “It just made sense all the way around to go in this direction. There are no hardware costs, no equipment costs.”
The city was already paying about $5,500 a year to have pagers, Ouellette said. The new system costs 99 cents per household per year, he added, and there are an estimated 6,300 households in the city. “We looked at that and went from $5,500 a year for pager costs alone to all encompassing at $6,300 a year for the whole package, for the community alerting system and staff alerting system. When you looked at the values, it was really a no-brainer. We’re not talking a lot of additional coin here to get to a system that is way more effective and efficient and has the bonus of a community alerting system.”
Powell River residents can expect to receive test messages in late September.
