City to Test New Emergency Broadcast

A mass emergency notification system to alert residents about hazardous local conditions such as wildfires goes

into action June 22, the day after the

official fire season begins, when police and fire officials conduct a citywide test.

The system can contact people by cell phone, landline phone, email and text messages. People can register up to three phone numbers and two email addresses.

Public safety officials believe the new system, Alert OC, could save lives during an emergency because residents who register can be notified more efficiently.

Since the public may not be at home to receive an emergency message on their phone, emergency preparedness officials urge residents and businesses provide additional wireless contact channels through the AlertOC self-subscription web portal: www.alertoc.com.

The new system would supplant the current reverse 911 call-out system to telephone land lines, which was implemented in 2000 and has proven unsatisfactory. "Our last attempted use took hours to call a small area," said acting Laguna Beach Police Chief Paul Workman, referring to an incident last year in Laguna Canyon where a downed tree caused a power outage. "The data base had aged," he said, with a third of the numbers either disconnected or belonging to people who were no longer in the immediate vicinity and not affected by the outage.

The biggest issue is the need to notify a neighborhood threatened by an oncoming fire of an impending evacuation, he said. "Sometimes we only have a few officers running door to door," he said.

Mass notification systems have been attributed with saving lives during fast-moving wildfires in 2007 when San Diego residents were called late at night and told to evacuate, said Teara LeBlanc, Orange County's Alert OC program manager.

In the first year of the system locally, 29 of 34 cities in the county have signed up, but just 23,000 residents have subscribed so far for alerts, LeBlanc said. About 2.3 million phone numbers from AT&T and Verizon landline accounts have already been added to the database, but such a system's effectiveness erodes as more people rely exclusively on wireless communication.

"Public awareness is a challenge," LeBlanc said, who intends to set up Facebook and Twitter pages online and is establishing alliances to reach customers of cell phone service.

"This is an important public safety tool that is only as good as the information we have in it," said Workman. "This really could save your life someday."

Unlike the previous system that could only be activated in the station, the web-based Alert OC system can be activated from computer-equipped fire trucks or a command post in the field, he said. "This system allows us to view a map on the computer, highlight the affected area, record a message and hit send," said Workman.

Alert OC, a product of Sherman Oaks-based Blackboard Connect Inc., apparently has agreements with phone companies for higher priority service, Workman said. The company stores its encrypted data behind firewall protected servers in more than one location in case of a disaster. County officials tested their system to validate its security barriers, LeBlanc said.

"Nothing's foolproof," Workman said. "But it's better than any existing system," he said.

How many residents are likely to subscribe isn't clear. "These exchanges of information work only if people are completely transparent about how it is going to be used," said Rebecca Jeschke, of the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital civil liberties group.

People set aside their privacy concerns for convenience, she said, citing, for example, the information collected from a toll-road transponder in her car. "It's disconcerting to me to receive a record of where I've traveled, but I've decided that's okay,"

Workman expects to see greater participation in high-risk neighborhoods such as Bluebird Canyon.

Alert OC will also permit better communication when emergencies overlap between cities. "A common emergency can be broadcast to any selected area in the county up to and including all numbers in the database," Workman said.

The system's costs were underwritten by the county's general fund and federal funding through emergency management grants.