911 public alert test will ring phones Thursday
By TOM BERRY
Staff Writer
This is a test. This is ONLY a test.
Most Murray-Calloway County residents, public offices, schools and businesses will hear those words when they answer their landline telephones Thursday morning as both city and county emergency 911 system tests a new public-alert computer software system.
Calloway County Emergency Management Director Bill Call, Judge-Executive Larry Elkins and other county officials will supervise a test of the new software around 10 a.m. Thursday.
The test, which may take several minutes to allow the system to connect to all phones in the county, will affect both the city and the rural areas, as well as selected areas that will test the system's capability in alerting only a single neighborhood within city limits or specific rural area of the county.
“We're going to try out our new OneCall emergency notification system that we have programmed into our computers,” Elkins said. “But we want everybody to know that this is just a test. We don't want to cause a panic. We think this is something that will save lives if it works the way we want it to.”
The system is being tested prior to Calloway County Fiscal Court's consideration of purchasing the software for use as a public alert system.
Call said the new program offers much promise because it will allow 911 emergency operation systems to alert the entire county or a particular neighborhood or area of the county quickly and easily in the event of a chemical spill, a jail escapee, a large field fire or even a missing child. The system can also be used to warn of the approach of a storm or other dangerous weather.
“It's a (electronic) map-oriented system so you can define who you want it to call,” Call said. “So we can call the whole county or, if we wanted, we could just notify a neighborhood. We can bring up the map on the computer screen, draw a circle or a square or whatever best defines the neighborhood, and the system then identifies all the phones within that neighborhood and it will call every telephone within that area.”
Cell phones will not be called during the experiment Thursday, only landline phones. However if the software is approved by court officials, the system can be programmed to call local cell phone users as well.
However the computer program will not be all that is tested. Although calls into the system will be initiated locally, the commands are relayed through a computer server in a nearby state for targeted distribution in Murray and Calloway County.
“We think that the system is a good system, but what we are really wanting to find out is if our local phone system will be able to handle the large number of calls in a way that will be beneficial,” Elkins said.
Those that receive the calls will hear an electronic “robo-call” that will announce the test and explain its purpose.
Story created Nov 12, 2008 - 11:56:21 EST.
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