Last modified Wed., November 22, 2006 - 01:34 AM
Originally created Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Code Red will keep residents in the loop, out of harm's way

By DREW DIXON, Shorelines staff writer

ATLANTIC BEACH - The City Commission this month approved a new emergency notification system that can automatically call residents about hurricane evacuations, broken water lines and other crises. Eventually, all three Beaches cities could be hooked up to the rapid calling program.

The Code Red system can make up to 60,000 phone calls an hour and is now approved to notify all 14,000 residents in Atlantic Beach if there's an emergency.

Atlantic Beach Police Chief David Thompson said the notification, which works with home or cell phones, is essential during emergencies since some people won't be tuned into the crisis.

"We've been through evacuations in years gone by. In 1999 [when Hurricane Floyd threatened], we had to go knock on people's doors because they don't watch local news, they don't listen to local radio," Thompson said. "We found there really were a lot of people that were out of the loop."

Code Red is an Ormond Beach-based company that provides a computerized telephone database that can be activated by emergency staff who enter a secure password. Authorities can activate the system for an entire city or for a specific neighborhood if there's a problem such as a water main break or power failure.

The service costs about $7,000 a year and Atlantic Beach is the first Beaches community to sign a contract with Code Red. Neptune Beach and Jacksonville Beach already have automated telephone contact systems but those systems are much slower than Code Red, taking hours instead of minutes to contact residents. Both cities are researching the possibility of switching to Code Red.

"There's a tremendous amount more potential to this [Code Red] system," said Jacksonville Beach City Manager George Forbes. "All we'd have to do is go to a computer screen and highlight an area."

Forbes said he expects to take the issue to the Jacksonville Beach City Council within a month.

Neptune Beach City Manager Jim Jarboe said he's also considering advising the City Council to contract with Code Red. But Jarboe said he wants a demonstration of a similar system from a company called First Call. Either way, Neptune Beach will be upgrading its emergency phone notification system.

"The current system is extremely slow," Jarboe said. "The difference of five or six hours versus a couple of minutes makes a world of difference if somebody's planning for an evacuation or some other kind of emergency."

While Jarboe said he's impressed with how the system can call all the city's residents, he's also encouraged by its ability to reach a specific neighborhood.

"Say that you have a water break and you have to give a boiled water notice, this way you can segregate out any particular area," Jarboe said. "If you had to close down a road in a certain area you could take those homes in that particular area and call all those homes."

Forbes said he likes that the system lets residents program their cell phones into the data bank if they choose and that it can leave a recorded message on voice mail.

Thompson said he's glad all three Beaches communities are considering upgrades to the emergency phone notification system.

"Sometimes we have things that may involve more than one city at the time," Thompson said. "This way, if we had something that is jointly affecting our communities and we made a decision, we could release that in conjunction with one another, we could coordinate that with one another and get the information out."

drew.dixon@jacksonville.com, (904) 249-4947, ext. 6313.