Vanderburgh County is set to get the Reverse 911 system that has a wide variety of uses including the dissemination of Amber Alerts, evacuation orders, boil water orders and road closings. Major Jonathan Weinzapfel has been championing for this for some time and was pleased to announce that County Commissioners have awarded a $ 266,500.00 Community Oriented Policing Service grant to implement this system.
This certainly will benefit the residents of Evansville and we applaud Major Weinzapfel for taking this step.
Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel and the County Commissioners are pleased to announce the awarding of a $266,500 Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) grant for a countywide emergency notification system.
An emergency notification system, often referred to as reverse 911, has a wide variety of uses including the dissemination of Amber Alerts, evacuation orders, boil water orders and road closings.
“An emergency notification system will enable us to instantly spread important information to either a targeted area or the entire county,” said Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel. “This will be a tremendously useful public safety tool and provides another method to communicate urgent matters with our residents.”
The first step in implementing an emergency notification system will be determining which service will be purchased. We won’t know exactly what functions the system will perform until a particular product is selected. There are other companies besides “Reverse 911” which offer emergency notification products. Central Dispatch will also meet with possible stakeholders who might be interested in using the service like the Evansville Vanderburgh School Corporation and the Evansville Water and Sewer Utility.
Funding for the emergency notification system was made possible when the 2008 Federal Budget was approved. The budget included a $266,500 appropriation for the system, which was obtained by Congressman Brad Ellsworth at the request of the County. The money was then distributed through a COPS grant. COPS’ mission is to advance community policing as an effective strategy in efforts to improve public safety.
Source: http://tristatehomepage.com/content/fulltext/?cid=32941
