Fort Pierce, FL --[EMERGENCY NOTIFICATION NEWS]-- Sept 4, 2007 - St. Lucie County Public Safety, in collaboration with the St. Lucie County Sheriff's Office, St. Lucie County Fire District, Fort Pierce and Port St. Lucie Police Departments, has taken a significant step in upgrading the ability to communicate critical emergency information to its residents. St. Lucie County Emergency Notification System (SLCENS), an automated telephone message delivery system, was activated on Sept. 1 and is now operational.
SLCENS can quickly deliver a voice message to telephones throughout St. Lucie County. The system will be activated and calls made to the affected community during emergencies in which there is a threat to life or property. Examples of such emergencies include critical missing person reports, natural disasters, hazardous materials or wildfire evacuation orders, and alerts of other eminent dangers.
Using a database that contains all of the telephone numbers in St. Lucie County and an integrated mapping program, SLCENS is able to isolate any specific geographic area and display the exact list of residential and business telephone numbers within it. For example, authorized personnel could identify all numbers within a half-mile area of a specific address within the county. St. Lucie County Public Safety, Sheriff's Office, Fire District, Fort Pierce or Port St. Lucie emergency response personnel are then able to create and send information or instructive messages to those telephones. SLCENS recalls numbers that are busy and leaves a message on phones that have a voice mail or answering machines.
SLCENS is able to reach as many telephones as the AT&T system can accommodate, possibly delivering as many as 30,000 messages in less than 10 minutes. All outgoing messages are in English, call recipients will be given the option to select Spanish if desired. FirstCall can deliver messages in more than 140 different languages. FirstCall of Baton Rouge, La., owns and operates the high-speed notification network on which SCLENS operates. FirstCall maintains 1,728 dedicated phone lines via a diverse entry fiber-optic network for outbound message delivery and is staffed 24 hours a day, 365 days a year by certified emergency notification personnel.
St. Lucie County residents with unlisted numbers can register for participation in the emergency telephone notification process. The privacy of these telephone numbers is protected under the normal non-disclosure agreement that FirstCall has with its clients. FirstCall Network also geo-codes cellular or wireless telephone numbers provided by residents or from the registration process.
Registration for the St. Lucie County Emergency Notification System can be done in three ways:
- 1. On line at www.firstcall.net and select Unlisted Registration.
- E-mail unlisted@firstcall.net , list your name, phone number, street address, city, state and zip code.
- Telephone by calling 1-866-484-3264. This process is very user friendly. Once the submitted number has been entered into the system, the person registering will then receive a message via the submitted number as a call back from the system confirming their registration.
Source: St. Lucie County Board of County Commissioners
