About 200 people have already subscribed to alerts through the CodeRed system, which the Department of Emergency Services has been quietly promoting while it continues to train 911 supervisors and other personnel on how to use it, said Rich Barbolish, deputy director of emergency management.
The department plans to make a big push to enroll the public once training is completed and the system is fully functional, which should be by the end of the year, he said.
The CodeRed system can be used to alert people to a variety of situations, from evacuation notices, weather advisories and highway closures to fire emergencies, boil-water notices and missing-children reports, Mr. Barbolish said.
“We have been lucky — and I keep my fingers crossed when I say this — that we haven’t really had anything that we had to put out in a major situation where people had to evacuate or shelter in place,” he said.
“But let’s say, for example, we had some type of (hazardous materials) situation where we had to tell people in a widespread area, ‘Look, stay in your house and close your windows.’ We could do it through this.”
A CodeRed sign-up link can be found on the home page of the county website, www.lackawannacounty.org.
County residents who sign up can select what type of notifications they want to receive and how they wish to receive them. The alerts can be delivered by text message, email, pager and even by voice message over a landline, Mr. Barbolish said. Preferences can be changed and people can unsubscribe at any time.
One of the nice things about the system is the ability it gives emergency management officials to tailor notifications to a specific area, Mr. Barbolish said. That means, for instance, an alert about an emergency affecting Carbondale would not necessarily be received by someone in Taylor.
“We can send it out countywide or we can send it out with a defined area, whether it’s a radius around a defined point or just a particular community,” Mr. Barbolish said.
Most of the people who have subscribed to CodeRed so far have signed up for the weather alerts.
Emergency services Director David Hahn said the weather notifications are automatically generated by the National Weather Service with no involvement by his department. The training now underway will ensure 911 supervisors and emergency management officials understand how and when to disseminate other types of notifications that originate with the county, he said.
“It’s a great system, but it’s really only as good as what we put into it,” Mr. Hahn said.
Mr. Barbolish said another CodeRed feature is a free mobile app for Android and iPhone devices that lets users receive alerts when they are traveling through other communities that are part of the notification system.
“If you have the app on your phone and you drive to California, anywhere they have CodeRed and put out an alert, you would get it,” he said. “If they have this product and they put out a tornado warning, you’re going to get that.”
There is no cost to county taxpayers for the system, which is being funded by the Northeast Pennsylvania Regional Counter Terrorism Task Force with a U.S. Department of Homeland Security grant. Mr. Barbolish said the system will eventually be rolled out in all eight counties that are part of the task force.
dsingleton@timesshamrock.com
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