County officials have signed an agreement adding another layer of communication to go out to people in a designated area in the event of immediate danger.
The Bartholomew County commissioners added their signatures Monday to a memorandum of agreement between the county and federal government to use the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Integrated Public Alert and Warning System (IPAWS) system.
Shannan Cooke, director of Bartholomew County Emergency Management, told commissioners that the IPAWS system would enable administrators to contact people on their electronic devices (phones) in the event of a life-threatening event, and does not require recipients of the messages to be registered users of Everbridge.
The IPAWS system works through Everbridge and is overseen by the same administrators, Cooke said. Commissioner Tony London, R-District 3, said roughly only 27,000 of the county’s 85,000 residents have signed up for Everbridge.
Everbridge is the county’s emergency alert system, providing notifications about emergencies, severe weather and other important local updates through a registered users preferred means.
“The crowd that we’re looking to reach with this would be visitors or people that are in town for a day or a weekend, and we have a life-threatening event,” Cooke said. “Whether that be weather or some kind of criminal act that’s going on that we need them to be aware of.”
Other examples when an alert would go out through the IPAWS system would be a gas leak, traffic accident involving hazardous materials or some type of shooting event, according to Cooke.
“We can select the area that we want the message to go out to by geofencing,” Cooke said. “It would allow us to reach users and make them aware of the situation, and it will base it off of the cell tower that their phone is pulling from.”
Signing up for IPAWs comes at no additional cost for the county, Cooke said. Administrators of the system have to go through requisite training, which Cooke said has already happened. All that’s left is for the federal government to sign-off on their portion of the agreement, meaning the IPAWS system will likely be available in the next month or so, according to Cooke.
“The other option that we have with that is we can have it send (the message) out one time, or we can give it a period of time for it to continue to send that message, where if anybody new comes into that area that we’ve designated, they will also receive that alert,” Cooke said.
