The app, KC Ready, was a joint effort by Kanawha County Emergency Management and Metro 911. Dale Petry, director of Emergency Management, said that KC Ready is a valuable resource to have when disaster strikes in the county or when residents simply want to prepare for the worst.
KC Ready can help clear the Metro 911 phone lines for those with emergencies as well, Petry said. The app does this by sending push notifications to its users about weather situations and traffic accidents using Metro 911’s live feed, so that a large number of residents don’t call in to report the same problem.
On top of these notifications, the “Kanawha Ready” tab serves as a resource for handling natural disasters like floods, tornados and winter storms. This section encourages users to create their own plan in the event of an emergency.
Also in this section is the “Build a Kit” function, which lets users identify which emergency items — flashlights, food, toiletries — they have, and which ones they should pick up.
Metro 911’s Live Traffic tracker is incorporated into the “Emergency” tab of the app. The tracker identifies which streets are open and flowing normally and which roads you should avoid during your daily commute.
The “Local Information” tab links to local organizations that Kanawha County residents likely depend on. For instance, there is a direct link to the Appalachian Power “Outages and Problems” page along with the regularly updated West Virginia American Water “Latest Alerts” page.
The app went live around a month and a half ago and has been downloaded 4,894 times on the Apple App Store and 2,285 times on the Google Play Store. KC Ready has delivered 368,088 push notifications, 157,754 of which have resulted in the user opening the app. Many of these notifications were delivered during June’s historic flood, Petry said.
KC Ready cost about $100,000 to make, Petry said, and was funded by private companies rather than taxpayer dollars. Some of the companies are represented within the app. Emergency Management and Metro 911 were aiming for quality, which Petry said they were assured of when 15 beta testers failed to crash the app.
In the future, Petry said that the Department of Highways would like to incorporate a real-time video stream of traffic to visually identify which roads may be closed or congested. This could be a way for Kanawha County residents to assure themselves that the route of their daily commute is clear before hitting the road.
This is just one way the app could get better in the future, Petry said, and the organizations behind it are looking for a number of new features to add in the future.
KC Ready is available to download for free on iOS and Android.
©2016 The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, W.Va.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
