Calling system in place for Alberto

 

By KAREN VOYLES

Sun staff writer

 

BRONSON - For about a day earlier this month, it looked to hurricane forecasters like Tropical Storm Alberto was targeting Levy County as a place to make landfall.

Unlike past storms when fire crews used bullhorns to urge residents to evacuate, county officials sent out the evacuation message with a new telephone system known as CodeRED.

CodeRED is an acronym for Code Rapid Emergency Communication. The Internet-based telephone system can simultaneously notify thousands of people about an evacuation or other emergency.

Officials in Levy and Gilchrist counties who have used the system said that once a decision is made to send out a message, someone in the dispatch center highlights the area on a computerized map where the calls need to be received. A message is recorded over the telephone - similar to recording an outgoing message on a voice-mail system - then, using a code, dispatchers type in the commands on their computer to begin the automated dialing process.

To notify residents that an evacuation order had been issued for Alberto, the system made calls to 15,074 telephone numbers. Some phones got several calls as the evacuation order grew from low-lying areas west of U.S. 19, to all low-lying areas and then all homes west of U.S. 19.

In about 60 percent of the cases, the calls were either received by someone answering the phone, or the evacuation message was left on voice-mail or an answering machine. Calls to the other 40 percent of households were not received, even after three attempts.

"We know that some people may not have picked up the call when they saw a strange number on the caller ID, which was 999-911-9999," said Levy County Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Chuck Bastak.

What telephone users heard was the voice of dispatch supervisor Paula Sprague providing details about the evacuation and giving a phone number to call at the Emergency Operations Center if they had questions about the evacuation.

"We did get a few calls from people, including one man who was really angry," said Sprague. The angry caller wanted to be removed from the system. Other callers were interested in having their cell phone numbers added to the alert system.

Bastak and Sprague said the phone numbers that are dialed in a specific area are those provided by the local phone company. BellSouth is the provider for most of Levy County. Residents who want to be removed from the notification system must sign a waiver for the Sheriff's Office. Those who wish to add their cell phones to the notification list can do so by logging onto levydisaster.com and following the prompts on the left side of the page under "Emergency Notification System."

Emergency operations centers in other counties using CodeRED have also developed ways for people to add or delete a phone number from the system.

CodeRED was developed by Emergency Communications Network Inc., an Ormond Beach company, and is used in emergency officials in 43 states and Citrus, Columbia, Gilchrist, Hamilton, Lafayette, Levy, St. Johns and Union counties.

"Putting out calls to the public is a race to get information out as fast as you can," said

David C. DiGiacomo, the vice president of operations for the company that developed CodeRED. "The only thing that limits us on how many calls we can make at the same time is the local system capacity - the number of lines going into an area."

DiGiacomo said his firm's phone network averaged 1.5 million emergency calls a month during 2005 and that most messages being sent out are about 30 seconds long. The firm is capable of sending out more than 300,000 messages of that length in about an hour if the local phone lines are available to accept that call volume.

Levy County agreed to an initial purchase of 40,000 minutes for $14,000, which is about 35 cents a minute. Bastak said the county will be reimbursed by FEMA for the more than 15,000 calls made during Alberto.

Karen Voyles can be reached at 486-5058 or voylesk@gvillesun.com

 

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