News

New emergency system alerts public to danger with high speed service
Sunday, January 22, 2006 12:09 PM CST

By GREG BISCHOF
Texarkana Gazette

The Oct. 15 train derailment and explosion in a railyard near downtown Texarkana provided an example of why local officials recently voted for a high-speed emergency response system.

A woman was killed and hundreds of Arkansas-side residents were forced from their homes.

The incident prompted the Intergovernmental Advisory Committee last week to hire the CodeRED Emergency Notification Systems of Ormond, Fla., to provide the high-speed public emergency warning service for the Texarkana area.

The system can be used to initiate as many as 1,600 telephone calls a minute to residences and businesses targeted for emergency evacuation.

Lt. Shawn Vaughn, the Bi-State Justice Building’s commander of Central Records and Communications, said the explosion caused by the derailment brought a flood of residential calls to the Bi-State emergency 911 system. The calls were from residents whose homes shook from the explosion, hoping to find out what happened. Others called in what they believed to be attempted burglaries since the explosions jolted their homes and made subsequent loud noises, Vaughn said.

Besides train derailments, fires and hazardous chemical situations, the new system, which would contain recorded public safety messages, can be used to notify residents of floods, weather warnings, environmental disasters and terrorist alerts. Such alerts could go out to a portion of the city or to the whole city if need be. The system could be programmed to call each individual resident as many as three times.

Besides alerting the public, the system could also be used to notify any public safety personnel needed to assist in any given emergency. For example, Vaughn said the few dispatchers working the morning of the derailment had to answer the flood of residential calls regarding the explosion, and call all available emergency and public safety personnel. “The dispatchers were having to answer all these calls as well as call about 90 police officers and other public safety personnel,” Vaughn said. “With this new system we can call all 90 officers in three minutes.”

Bowie County Judge James Carlow said CodeRED would have also greatly aided emergency management personnel that day because the county had to contend with putting public school buses on standby to possibly evacuate as many as 900 of its inmates out of the Bowie County Correctional Center the Bi-State Justice Building Jail, if necessary.

“As it turned out, we didn’t need to evacuate the prisoners. But for a while it looked like we might have to because of the location of the rail yards,” he said.