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Saturday, June 3
BRATTLEBORO -- An official at Vermont Yankee is
accepting blame for not circulating the results of a recent emergency
notification drill to local selectboards in a timely manner.
Mark Gilmore, the offsite coordinator for Entergy, said he promised to
have those results to the towns shortly after the Code Red test, but now
-- five weeks later -- some town officials said they haven't heard a word
about the results.
Officials in Brattleboro, Dummerston and Guilford all said they had
not received an official report of the test that occurred more than a
month ago. Calls to other towns were not returned by press time.
The Code Red Emergency Notification System employs an Internet-mapping
technique for geographic targeting of calls, according to a Web site
devoted to Code Red.
"Coupled with a high speed telephone calling system capable of
delivering customized pre-recorded emergency messages directly to homes
and businesses, live individuals and answering machines, (it makes calls)
at the rate of up to 60,000 per hour.
"It's my fault they didn't receive a report," said Gilmore,
adding he was under the impression that the towns had received a basic
report about the results. When he learned they had not, he promised to
get the report out soon.
Dummerston's Selectboard Chairwoman Cindy Jerome, said not only had
she not received a report, she didn't receive a phone call during the
test.
"I haven't gotten any calls at home or at work," she said
Friday. "So the question is, who got calls and who didn't?"
Gilmore said he apologized for not communicating better with the
towns, but said that his door was always open.
"I encourage the towns to come to me for whatever information
they might need," he said, adding at selectboard meetings he didn't
mean to imply that he would be issuing a detailed report for each town
involved in the Code Red test.
"It was just a test of the compatibility of the Code Red system
with the local phone system," said Gilmore. "My intention was just
to let them know if the test was a success or not."
Gilmore said he and other VY officials were "ecstatic" with
the test results, saying in the first six minutes, the system dialed more
than 4,800 numbers. He said the test yielded a 77.75 percent connection
rate, which he said was well within the average success rate of 60 to 75
percent for other Code Red systems in the nation.
"So 77.75 percent is a very respectable number," he said,
adding he has at this time no plans to issue a more detailed report.
"The test was a complete success from our point of view."
Gilmore said in 33 minutes, Code Red was able to alert almost 12,000
residences.
"There were no problems," he said. "It worked
superbly."
Gilmore said his major concern was not the nature of the phone tree
itself, but whether the communication infrastructure could handle a large
number of calls in a small amount of time.
"We were very pleased," said Verizon spokeswoman Beth
Fastiggi, adding the test showed no major problems with Verizon's infrastructure.
"We were monitoring the network and everything performed very
well."
Fastiggi said, though Verizon is just an interested party in the Code
Red system, it wants to make sure its lines can handle the volume of
calls.
"It's such an important system to the citizens of the area and we
want to make sure that people can get their calls in an emergency,"
she said.
Meyer said Guilford was the first town to institute the Code Red
system and during the first test, he thought it worked well.
"In a short period of time I was able to learn who received a
call and who didn't, so we can be aware of them and what kind of action
we need to take to notify those people," he said.
"We were the first town, a couple of years ago, and it worked
pretty well," said Clark. "But on the last test we haven't
heard anything."
Despite the success of the test, many residents are not convinced that
Code Red is the best system for emergency notifications.
"The sirens, I think, would be more effective than the
radios," said Clark. "They would satisfy the biggest bloc of
people."
"We are asking for redundancy in our notification system,"
said Dummerston Selectboard member Paul Normandeau, at a meeting with
Gilmore in April. "It was felt that tone alert radios weren't that
effective. We would rather have people hear the message three times
rather than not at all."
"The phone tree, Code Red, is turning out to be the most
productive tool in our emergency toolbox," insisted Gilmore on
Friday. "The sirens are an outdoor warning device which has its
place as do the radios," he said. "We are trying to get a depth
and field of notification so we use all of the avenues to the fullest of
our extent."
"We really like sirens," said Jerome, during the April
meeting. "We have been talking about it for quite a while."
"We requested one siren on Dummerston Hill, one at the West
Dummerston fire house, one at the town garage and one at the
school," said Larry Lynch, Dummerston's emergency manager, Friday.
Remillard said Brattleboro submitted a request to Entergy last year
asking for five sirens.
"We had a request into the utility asking for more sirens for a
long time," said Remillard. "We are being told there needs to
be further noise propagation studies."
But Remillard, and other town officials, want to know what happened
with the propagation study that was conducted when the old sirens were
replaced in 2004.
"Assuming the topography hasn't changed since the test in the
1980s, and assuming the population hasn't changed dramatically, the conclusions
that would be drawn from a new study would probably be the same as the
old," said Jerome, during the April meeting.
But Gilmore said two propagation studies conducted in the past were
suitable for sirens already in place, and a new study is being conducted
to evaluate the placement of new sirens.
"Any sirens that we add we need to now where they overlap,"
said Gilmore, saying he was awaiting the results of the third, and
latest, test. "We are plotting this so we can alert the biggest
amount of people with the least number of sirens."
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