Customer Spotlight: Warren County, NJ

Warren County is located in northwestern New Jersey and encompasses 22 municipalities consisting of townships, cities, towns, boroughs and villages in a 363 square mile area. The Rapid Notify system enables the Warren County Office of Emergency Management to contact over 110,000 area residents in the event of an extreme emergency situation.

Warren County teamed up with the local Merrill Creek Dam to purchase the system with funding in part provided by Federal Homeland Security grants.

The County primarily uses the Rapid Notify system in situations such as heavy snowstorms and flooding.  The system proved to be valuable in 2011 with Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee.

Through the newly-integrated online self-registration portal, Warren County residents can now sign up to receive emergency alert notifications on their cell phone as well as unlisted landline number.  Self-registrant addresses are periodically geo-coded into the Rapid Notify mapping system, enabling more precise alert targeting based on proximity to an emergency situation.

“I am very happy with the Rapid Notify system,” said Bill Hunt, Deputy Emergency Management Coordinator for Warren County Office of Emergency Management. “You push the button and it’s done. The speed of the system is amazing.”

In an emergency situation, the OEM coordinator for each municipality is directed to specify the message content and the area to be alerted and forward the information to the county office, which is then sent out on their behalf.

Now the County is encouraging its municipalities to establish sub-accounts to enable communications on a more relevant local level.  Allamuchy Township has just signed on and will soon have the ability to load its own contact lists and messages.

The County holds the master account, giving “parent” oversight control of all contact lists and alert messages, while giving municipal sub-accounts “child” level control over their own individual contact lists.  The “child” sub-account contacts can be alerted separately by local officials or all together by the master county account.  This helps to unify all communication channels into a single system to simplify activation, ensure message consistency and reduce alerting time.

Customer Spotlight: Washington County, Ohio

Washington County, Ohio has an approximate population of 62,000 in an area of 640 square miles. The Washington County Emergency Management Agency uses the Rapid Notify system to call out Police, Fire, EMS, and Industrial emergency response personnel. In addition, the system will be used for flood level call outs for the area, including the city of Marietta.

With the county bordered to the south and east by the Ohio River, residents are sometimes at risk of flooding. Earlier this spring, 21 Ohio counties were included in a federal disaster declaration as a result of severe storms.

Washington County recently completed installation of a flood warning system that includes three U.S. Geological Survey stream gauges installed in Duck Creek through Noble and Washington counties. The gauges collect data on rainfall, water level and stream flow, and transmit that information via satellite to the National Weather Service, which collects the data and makes it available to the public online.

“Local emergency management officials can directly monitor the gauges to keep tabs on water levels and warn residents of potential flood threats through a Rapid Notify call-down system, according to Jeff Lauer with the Washington County Emergency Management Agency.”

Washington County plans to implement the Rapid Notify online self-registration portal to allow area residents to opt-in and choose from multiple methods of communication. Residents will soon be able to sign up to receive emergency alert notifications via landline or cellular telephone, SMS text message, and e-mail. Alerts can be targeted to specific neighborhoods or communities in the event of a flash flood using Rapid Notify’s GIS Mapping capability.

Customer Spotlight: Belmont, CA

The City of Belmont is located in San Mateo County, California, between San Francisco and San Jose. For over ten years, Belmont city officials have used the Rapid Notify system to contact area residents, a population of approximately 26,000, in the event of an emergency situation.

Belmont’s Community Alert System, powered by Rapid Notify, is used to send messages for such diverse situations as police activity, severe weather warnings, and evacuation alerts. In addition, the Belmont Safe Schools Program was created for local public and private schools to have the ability to send emergency messages to students, parents, and staff.

After a recent string of burglaries, residents requested more real-time, proactive communication from city officials. Belmont responded by implementing the Rapid Notify online self-registration portal to allow residents to choose multiple methods of communication. Belmont residents can now sign up to receive emergency alert notifications via landline or cellular telephone, SMS text message, or e-mail.  In the first 30 days, since the announcement of self-registration, almost 150 residents signed up for notifications.

“In recent years we have noticed that fewer and fewer residents are getting our telephone alerts, we need to change our communication strategies to recognize that many people are moving away from traditional land-line phones to cellular and voice over IP services.” said Belmont Police Chief Don Mattei.  “Getting crime information out to the public, such as our recent spike in thefts, is an important part of our community policing efforts. We have to convey information quickly, in the way people want to get it.”