If you live in Polk County and have a traditional landline telephone, expect a phone call in the afternoon on Friday, May 25 from the Polk County Sheriff's Office. They will be testing a new emergency alert calling system.
On Friday, May, 25 the Office will test an automated calling system called CodeRED that will allow the Polk County Sheriff’s Office to quickly reach thousands of homes in case of emergency.
Sign up to be notified on your cell phone
The system will call all land line phones. If you have a cell phone, you must sign up for the program by providing your phone number. Instructions for that simple process are at the bottom of this story.
Polk County Sheriff Pete Johnson said, “CodeRED is a nationwide program that several area counties are now using. It is the largest service of its kind.
“This need creeped up for us at the Polk County Government Center when we had a bomb threat at the building one and a half years ago,” Sheriff Johnson said. “We had no way to contact employees that were out of the building, or to contact the local area without knocking on everybody’s door. Working with the county administration, we decided we needed some way to put out these emergency notices.”
The CodeRED system allows the Sheriff's Office to contact every land line phone in the county, plus those with cell phones who sign up and provide their cell phone number.
Whole county or pinpointed calls
The system can reach out to the whole county, or it can also be pinpointed to contact everyone in a specific geographic area of the county, such as a certain area east of Osceola, Johnson said.
Johnson said his department can draw a ‘geographic fence’ on a map and the CodeRED system will call every phone number inside that area, including cell phone users who live outside the area but happen to be in the area when the call is placed.
“This is just another tool to reach people when important safety measures need to be taken,” Johnson said. “It’s not going to replace us working in an area because we know not everyone has phones and may not get the message. It will allow us to reach most people a lot quicker and potentially save lives and time.”
Johnson said the CodeRED program is similar to the calling program many schools use to alert students, parents, teachers and staff when a school will start late, close early or cancel class for the day.
Notifications may include but are not limited to emergency evacuations, missing children alerts, emergency road closures, extreme weather alerts, etc.
Avoiding overuse
Johnson said the CodeRED system would not be used for storm warnings. “They are already covered, and we don’t want to over-use the system or de-sensitize people to the calls. But if it is something serious like a tornado on the ground, then we would use it. You don’t want to bother or panic people who aren’t involved, but you want to direct the call as much as you can. If it works as advertised, and we think it will, it looks like it’s going to be a really good program.”
Johnson said the sophisticated calling system uses multiple calling centers and can place thousands of phone calls at the same time.
People who don’t want to participate can ”opt out” when they receive the call Friday, he said.
How to sign up
To sign up, look for CodeRED at the Polk County Facebook page or the Polk County website.
Last Update: May 25, 2018 3:15 pm CDT
