SITKA, ALASKA
It’s called CodeRED, and it allows the police to deliver a 60 second voice message to every land line in Sitka, along with cell phones that are registered.
“Or we can actually drill it down to a small section on the map,” said Tim White, police technician for the Sitka Police Department. “Say there’s a fuel leak or some type of hazardous chemical spill. We can click on that site on the map and say ‘500-yard radius’ … and it’ll call everybody within that radius.”
Tsunamis, earthquakes, police situations, water-main breaks — the system is designed to handle any of the various reasons authorities would need to distribute information quickly.
White says that means the public gets information about their safety and emergency dispatchers aren’t bogged down trying to get notifications out.
He says he can easily recall situations where the technology would have come in handy, for example, in 2007, when a small plane crashed into a home on Katlian Street.
“We have one dispatcher on, and they had to call 13 people, call and notify the Coast Guard, try and get the police department, try and get the ambulance and answer all the incoming calls at the same time,” he said. “So instead of dialing those 13 numbers they can just do this one quick activation, and it calls the people that need to be notified: the Coast Guard, the DOT, the airport, and that’s out of the way so they can start dealing with the phone calls coming in and the radio traffic.”
White said the CodeRED program costs $15,000 a year, and up through this year is paid for by a grant from the Department of Homeland Security.
The company that runs the program, the Florida-based Emergency Communications Network, obtained all the land line numbers in Sitka, but depends on individuals to enter cell phone numbers and addresses. That can be done online.
White pulls up the company’s Web site on a computer in his office at the Sitka police department.
“And it comes up with just a real simple form,” he said, pointing to the screen. “You put in your street address, and it has to be a street address. We can’t do our geo-reference off a PO Box, because it doesn’t know where the PO Boxes are located.”
The information you enter becomes confidential. Not even the police can access individual numbers.
“We have no way of accessing that database,” he said. “It’s all sealed up in the CodeRED system. We can’t look up people’s numbers and be big brother or anything like that with this system.”
And if something happens, either communitywide or in your neighborhood, the police will be able to send you an alert.
“You’ll get a phone call and if there’s a busy signal it will try three times to call you. And after that it’s going to leave a voice mail message giving you an 800 number to call. You call that 800 number and you can replay the message if you missed it the first time or for some reason you didn’t get it.”
White says the department will likely test the program sometime in the next month, probably at the same time the fire department tests its tsunami warning sirens.
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