An app and web-based system will help the city of Warsaw provide a “simple, efficient” way to communicate with its residents on everything from trash schedules and park events to gas leaks and other emergencies.
Residents will have to subscribe to the notifications.
Staci Young, assistant to Mayor Joe Thallemer, told the Board of Public Works and Safety Friday, “We are seeking your approval for an agreement with CivicReady for their mass notification system and Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) service.”
Cost is $7,526.40 for the first year and then $6,426.40 annually.
She said CivicReady is for mass notification of residents.
“It’s kind of a one-click solution for us. So right now, if there’s an emergency, we have to sit and one by one notify the appropriate parties, whether it’s posting to Facebook and then we contact local media, and then we’re trying to use our website to contact residents who subscribe to it, etc., etc., and that takes time,” Young said.
CivicReady would allow the city to “pre-program template messages. It would allow us to push out to all of those channels at one time.”
Young said CivicReady can do 12,000 voice calls, 60,000 text messages and 50,000 emails in one minute and it supports 60 languages.
“So there’s a lot of different ways that residents can sign up for this service. They can get text messages, they can get emails, they can do their RSS feed, desktop notifications. One thing that I really like is you can do voice calls, so even if we have senior citizens who are not using text messaging and web-based applications, they can get signed up through the city offices to receive a voice phone call that sounds like the weather man you hear when they have a weather alert on the radio and it reads that notification to them on the phone. So this really is a broad notification system,” Young explained.
The system also allows for geo-fencing. A geo-fence is a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area, according to information found online.
“That will allow us to target our messages to a specific area,” Young said.
As an example, if there’s a gas leak on Market Street the entire city doesn’t necessarily need to know about it. The geo-fencing will allow the city to notify those in the area who do need to know about it and those who might need to evacuate. Anyone who enters the area within a certain time frame also can be alerted about the emergency.
“So that will give us capabilities for emergencies. The parks department can use that for events if they’re having the classic rock concert downtown. Anybody entered into that park area, if they need to get a missing child notification out or weather notice out, they can just geo-fence that area of the park,” Young said.
IPAWS is a program through the Federal Emergency Management Agency and is similar to the Amber Alerts. Whether or not a person has subscribed to the alerts, they’ll still get an alert on their mobile device letting them know about an emergency.
“FEMA has it pretty locked down as to what uses you can use that for and we would keep that pretty tight within the city, but it would allow us – if we had a missing person, if we had an active shooter situation in town, something to that effect that would be within their categorizations that they allow – to force that notification to every mobile device in that area regardless of whether residents have subscribed for a specific alert or not. It’s in the interest of community safety,” Young said.
Eventually all the various city departments will be involved in the system that’s going to be used in many different ways.
Board of Works member Jeff Grose said the system will be very helpful.
George Clemens, board member, asked if the system’s references have been verified.
Young said she spoke with representatives of a community in Georgia that was affected by a hurricane last year.
“(They were) able to use the full system, so not just the notification but also the IPAWS part of that as well. They were very happy with that,” she said.
The city will have to get residents to sign up for it. “It’ll be a process to get that really built up. We’d like for residents to take advantage of it,” Young said.
The board approved the agreement with CivicReady for the mass notification system and IPAWS.
