County, city team up on reverse 911 system

By CYNDY COLE
Sun Staff Reporter
Arizona Daily Sun
azdailysun.com
Thursday, November 08, 2007

When the Woody fire flared up in June 2006, Pat Petro had only about 10 minutes to evacuate.

The fire had burned toward Petro and her Kit Carson RV Park for about half an hour, but she couldn't see anything through the smoke.

The police she contacted by phone couldn't give her much information either, she said, until they showed up to evacuate everyone.

"You sit here not knowing whether you should get out or you shouldn't," the Kit Carson manager remembered.

That's all due to change in the spring, when Coconino County and the city of Flagstaff fire up an automated system to call residents in cases of floods, fires and felons on the loose. The Coconino County Board of Supervisors approved the purchase this week.

"We're pretty jazzed about this," said Sgt. Tom Boughner, of the Flagstaff Police Department.

The $10,000 system is meant to be another layer of the emergency warning system now broadcast on radio and television -- one that can reach homeowners at 3 a.m. when the television and radio might be turned off.

In cases like the Woody fire, it would also give residents more time to evacuate, possibly giving them time to retrieve pets and belongings.

It's also capable of notifying a block, a neighborhood or an entire city anywhere in the county by rapidly dialing hundreds of phone numbers per minute, said Sherrie Collins, Coconino County emergency manager.

The messages can deliver information in different languages and can be prerecorded to deliver information specific to emergencies common in this county: snowstorms, fires, hazardous materials spills and floods. And it could be used, Boughner said, to deliver general warnings to a community with an armed suspect on the loose or a neighborhood targeted by criminal activity.

Northern Arizona University has also instituted an emergency alert system that will deliver text messages in the case of emergencies or weather-related closures.

There are two potential problem areas in the new countywide warning system: the need for electricity and the prevalent use of cell phones.

While the system will generate phone calls regardless of local power supply, any resident who has a cordless home phone will lose service if they lose power. Those people won't receive the call.

"As part of being prepared in at home, there are two things you need to buy. One is a (corded) hard-line home phone. The other is a weather radio," Collins said.

Cell phone numbers won't be entered into this system unless cell users individually request it.

This can be a particular problem for visitors or residents who don't have home phones and rely entirely on cell phones.

"In order to reach out to those communities, we need them to voluntarily enter in their phone numbers," Collins said.

The county will be creating a means for Coconino County residents with cell phones to voluntarily give their names, addresses and phone numbers to be included in emergency notification, Collins said. Sign-ups will begin in a few weeks.

Petro would have been glad for such a system in 2006, she said.

She had a store and dozens of tenants renting spaces in their recreational vehicles, including an 84-year-old tenant with a broken hip.

There's no way she could have contacted them all quickly enough, she said, and they had to leave their trailers behind.

"The more time you've got, the better," she said.

Cyndy Cole can be reached at 913-8607 or at ccole@azdailysun.com.