Columbus and Bartholomew County are set to transition to a new emergency notification system.
Bartholomew County Emergency Management has used Everbridge for the last “11 or 12” years and is switching vendors to CodeRED, which Shannan Cooke, director of Bartholomew County Emergency Management (BCEM), said is 50% less expensive, easier to administer and has multi-language capabilities.
The Bartholomew County commissioners on Monday signed on to a statement allowing emergency management to make the switch.
The agreement with Everbridge is up in September 2026 so there will be about a year where emergency management is using two emergency notification systems while the change is being made. Cooke added that anyone who signed up for Everbridge will automatically be moved over to CodeRED.
The county will pay for the first year at $11,944.99, and beginning in year two, the city and county will split the cost, with the city paying 59% of the total. The cost split for CodeRED will be the same as it was for Everbridge, except now the county will bill the city, Cooke said.
“As many people are aware, we’ve experienced some issues with Everbridge over the last couple of years. We’ve had them for approximately 11 or 12 years, and we’ve not really evaluated any of the other companies that have come about and are available to us in that time frame,” Cooke said. “With our contract coming up next year, it would be a good time for us to do that.”
Emergency management contacted other emergency management agencies in the state to learn what they preferred and landed on CodeRED.
“We are going to try to make this as seamless as possible for the end users All of those will be migrated over, (as well as) all of our current templates that we use,” Cooke said. “… “We are getting six months free, which will allow us to migrate everything over and get everybody trained, and then we’ll have a year to test the system.”
The current cost for Everbridge is $27,883.96 a year, of which the county pays $11,432.
“With the storms that we’ve had and the flood that we had back in the spring, people sometimes got the message, sometimes they didn’t,” observed Commissioner Tony London, R-District 3. “With a tornado, we’d get the federal message, but we may not get a local message. Hopefully this puts an end to that and people can be notified in plenty of time to make good decisions.”
The change comes after the deadly July floods in the Texas Hill Country that killed more than 130 people, more than 100 in Kerr County. Notably, CodeRED is the emergency notification the local emergency management agency in Kerr County used. Firefighters had asked for a CodeRED alert as early as four hours into the flooding, but the response was delayed, according to wire reports.
Gov. Mike Braun later in July launched an Emergency Alert Task Force to evaluate the current alert and warning systems in Indiana and identify opportunities to enhance those systems or provide additional warning systems.
The commissioners in April signed an agreement to add another layer of communication to go out to people in a designated area in the event of immediate danger in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) system.
