EWS for Local Emergency Management
Save Lives - Satisfy Government Mandates, Mitigate Planning Issues, Save Money.
Emergency Warning
Network Applications
... for Local Emergency Management
Local Governments have to deal with a wide range of possible emergencies - some probable - some not. Often grants and funding only cover part of the cost or only address some of the needs making for difficult choices.
Traditional siren infrastructure is expensive to build and maintain, and is of limited use since it does not inform. Local TV and radio media are a good way to distribute information but are increasingly run unattended at night making nighttime alerts difficult to arrange at all.
Non targeted siren alarms can often overload law enforcement with unnecessary calls from people who are concerned but not threatened.
Reverse 911 seems a good way to get targeted messages to people but enough lines to call everyone quickly can be expensive and as every telemarketer knows, many calls just go to answering machines. Can you afford to wait even 15 minutes for everyone to be called?
Our Warning System ...
... is Effective and Simple to Use
Our network uses a specially designed clock radio to wake people up and send them messages that they can read on the display. As the system owner, you choose what to send, to which group of radios and at what level of urgency over a simple web interface to our server. There is no equipment to buy other than the radios themselves. The system is thus easy to set up and affordable whether you need 100 radios or a million.
Scenario 1
It is 4am and a Flash Flood is forecast for the valley in 10 minutes.
Solution
Send a message to group 7 radios - everyone in the valley flood plain, telling them to seek higher ground now.
Scenario 2
A snowstorm is quickly shutting roads down and the schools need to close early so everyone can get home.
Solution
You have someone from the school district send appropriate non emergency messages to radios in group 14 (residents having a child at Valley High) and another message out to group 16 (residents having a child at Walker Elementary). This is possible because you allowed certain school employees to have low priority logons giving them the ability to trigger the radios in non emergency mode.
How it works
You log on to a special website to compose and direct your messages. These warning messages are then sent to our network of commercial FM stations and broadcast using the Radio Data System (RDS) channel. The infrastructure is already there and the high power and coverage of FM make it ideal for reliable distribution of such warnings. RDS is used worldwide and is a very robust data channel.
The Receiver
The RDS Early Warning Receiver looks and acts like a normal FM clock radio until it is triggered. Then it loudly announces your message and scrolls it across the screen for all to read.
It is equipped with two tuners. One is for the clock radio - the second tuner locks to our network station and listens to the RDS-emergency-channel continuously - even if the radio is "off". The clock is kept updated by the network so it is extremely accurate.
This commercial quality receiver is equipped with a rechargeable backup battery so it will alert many hours after power is lost. The receiver is designed to reach everybody, and it is loud enough to alert everyone even if they are not in the same room.
There is also an enhanced "professional" version with even more features for first responders and the disabled.
Additionally, external devices like large-scale displays (billboards), lamps, flashing lights, etc may be hooked up to the Professional version triggered by relay or its serial interface.