Saturday, April 22, 2006

EATONTOWN — The voice at the other end of the telephone sounded like NASA Mission Control.

"Please enter your launch code now," the electronic voice commanded.

With a few taps of the telephone keypad, Sgt. Thomas Ferrugia punched in his code and, within five seconds, the prerecorded message came through loud and clear on his department-issued cell phone.

The telephone system that Ferrugia demonstrated early this week has little to do with NASA. It is how the borough's Police Department will alert township residents and businesses in case of an emergency.

Early this month, the borough moved away from an older, reverse 911 system it shared with four other municipalities and installed a new system called Code Red, a high-speed telephone alert service developed by a Florida company.

The system costs about $5,000 annually, and the company, Emergency Communications Network Inc., provides the borough with 25,000 minutes a year for emergency calls.

Like reverse 911, the new system works off a database of telephone numbers, which are called when police activate it through a Web site. The new system also allows police to call residents within a specific geographic area or create a special database with only certain residents or businesses.

The company that runs the system maintains three automated telephone banks along the East Coast. If one fails, another telephone bank is activated to complete the calls. The system can make 60,000 calls per hour.

Every home and business in Eatontown can be reached within 10 minutes.

"I think people expect this kind of service," Police Chief George S. Jackson said of the new system. "A lot of the bigger police departments use systems like Code Red. We are a densly populated town and we have a lot of businesses and apartment complexes and it would take a significant amount of man hours to go around an alert these people to an emergency."

So far, of the borough's 14,000 residents, more than 3,600 have signed up for the service. In addition, more than 300 businesses, plus 170 stores at the Monmouth Mall, have also been added the department's database.

Now, Ferrugia, who works in the department's Services Division, is working on making sure as many residents and businesses in the borough sign up for the emergency service.

"The information will only be used for emergency notification purposes and phone numbers are kept confidential," Ferrugia added.

The borough decided to move away from the older reverse 911 system last summer, following a water main break in Middletown that affected several other Monmouth County communities, including Eatontown.

The old system failed to notify a number of borough residents about the emergency, Councilman Charles E. DaVis, who fielded numerous complaints about the miscommunication.

"The water main break showed that there were holes in the operation," said DaVis, himself a former police officer.

The new system is not a shared service and will only be used in emergencies, such as last summer's water main break.

The Code Red system will help with other large-scale emergencies such as when the Petco building exploded or in smaller cases such as a missing Alzheimer's patient, Ferrugia said.

As for the old reverse 911 system, the four other communities, Shrewsbury, Fair Haven, Little Silver and Rumson, will continue with the shared service agreement, Shrewsbury Capt. Timothy Spenser said this week.

The system, based in Shrewsbury, will undergo an upgrade in the next few months that will allow an emergency call to reach all residents in the database within two minutes, Spenser said.