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County, Bishop ready to dial up reverse 911 |
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Monday, 05 November 2007 |
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By Mike Gervais
Register Staff 11-3-2007
Inyo County is on the path to organizing a new emergency notification system that will cut down the time it takes to notify residents of pending evacuations or other emergency situations, ranging from medical hazards to closed roads.
The new system is called reverse 911 and will send out automated phone calls to designated houses, businesses, residential blocks, towns or the entire county, depending on the situation or emergency.
Inyo County Sheriff Bill Lutze received approval from the Inyo County Board of Supervisors to go ahead with the $10,000-plus system. Shortly after Lutze received his approval to move forward with reverse 911, Bishop Police Chief Joe Pecsi got onboard, receiving permission from the Bishop City Council to pay for the city’s share of the software to get the system on track.
“We had to purchase the 911index from Verizon and had to purchase one from Pacific Bell, which covers the desert” to acquire all the street addresses and phone numbers for each resident in each community in Inyo County, said Lutze.
Those packages cost $1,400 for the unincorporated parts of the county, and $2,000 for the City of Bishop. That is a one-time flat rate. There is a $6 monthly charge to both departments that includes weekly updates to the index, which includes taking out cancelled phone numbers and adding new numbers, matching them up with the physical address they are located at.
“Those (indexes) were recently shipped out,” Lutze said.
The total reverse 911 package will set the county back a total of $9,800 each year.
The purchase of the reverse 911 package will come from a Homeland Security grant the county received this year.
The reverse 911 system has the ability to reach most residents in a community the size of Independence, for example, in about four or five minutes, Lutze explained.
The reverse 911 system, when activated, will send phone calls out to each home in the designated area with a pre-recorded automated message, notifying residents of the possibility of evacuations, impending floods, hazardous materials in the air or water or other emergencies.
Also, “when an incident occurs where we don’t have a pre-canned recording, we can make a recording,” Lutze said.
The system will call each home, placing any line that receives a busy signal at the bottom of the list. If an answering machine catches the call from reverse 911, a message will be left and return calls will be made periodically until the system is turned off or a response is received from residents.
When a resident picks up a call from reverse 911 a recording will notify them of the incident, required or recommended actions on the part of the resident and ask that the resident press the number 1 on their phone to indicate that they understand the message, press 2 for more information or press 3 to hear the message again, for example.
A printed read-out will be available for law-enforcement, informing them which reverse 911 calls were received by residents, which reached answering machines and which had not been reached anyone all, due to disconnected telephones or busy signals.
When the system is in place “we won’t only rely on reverse 911,” Lutze explained, noting that deputies and volunteers will still be required to go door to door in the case of mandatory evacuations, but “it will allow us to reach residents faster.”
“This would have saved us a lot of man hours and a lot of time during the Inyo Complex Fire,” Lutze explained, noting that many residents would have had more time to prepare for evacuations in Independence and the possible evacuations (that never came) in Big Pine.
“This winter – with the fires that we’ve had – any weather or flooding that may occurs, (reverse 911) can be used for all that,” Lutze said.
The Bishop Police Department and the county Sheriff’s Department are hoping to have the reverse 911 system online and functioning within the next month, or by the first of the year at the very latest, Lutze said, noting that there were some complications organizing the 911 index and maps of Inyo County and placing each phone number with the residence where it belongs.
An added bonus to reverse 911 is that when it goes online, residents will be able to visit a Web site and provide additional contact information. For example, someone who lives in Bishop, but works in Mammoth Lakes will be able to provide reverse 911 with an e-mail address, cell phone number, work phone number and even the number of relatives.
“When this system is in place we will be notifying people by mail and by news media” and providing the e-mail address for residents to provide additional information.
The Web site for updated and additional information is a secure site. “In other words,” Lutze said, “those numbers and that information will not be sold out” to telemarketers and spammers, and will only be used if and when the reverse 911 system has to be activated.
The reverse 911 system will be available only to the Inyo County Sheriff’s Department, Bishop Police Department, Inyo County Health and Human Services, and the Inyo County Road Department.
“We’re really looking forward to having this,” Lutze concluded.
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Last Updated ( Wednesday, 12 December 2007 )
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