Notify Me not anymore

By Collin Gallant on November 14, 2018.

cgallant@medicinehatnews.com @CollinGallant

The city’s emergency alert system Notify Me Now will notify no more, a city committee heard on Tuesday.

The system that sends localized instructions in case of emergency to those who register was launched in 2016, but has only been used four times, and is largely the same as a new provincial alert plan, administrators say.

“We see this as a duplicate system,” corporate services commissioner Brian Mastel told the committee Tuesday.

Merrick Brown, the city’s general manager of emergency management, says the service cost the city $18,500 annually. Administrators say they have confirmed all personal information held by provider Everbridge will be destroyed.

Committee members questioned the value of the provincial system compared to keeping the local contract. They were told that since the spring Alberta Emergency Alert’s cellphone alert program has “functioned very well.”

Notify Me Now relies on text messages, not the cellular data platform like provincial alerts, which are faster and more reliable for wide broadcasts for cellphone contact.

Notify Me Now, which was also available to Redcliff and Cypress County residents, allowed residents to register an address then choose how they wished to be contacted, either by cell, land line telephone, email or text message.

The provincial system was expanded last spring to include alerts to all cellphones within a large geographic area determined by cellphone towers, as well as traditional methods of radio and television broadcasts.

“I am a little concerned that we’ll lose the personal geographic access,” said committee chair Coun. Robert Dumanowski, adding that caller systems work well for schools. “It’s a platform that’s growing.”

Coun. Brian Varga said his concern was that warnings were timely and correct.

The city began evaluating the service following the 2013 flood in Medicine Hat as a way to broadcast messages and instructions to the public for a variety of emergency situations, including floods, fires and chemical spills.

Those can require different actions from residents, either to evacuate or shelter in place, and can affect wide or small areas.

However, there was always confusion over dangerous weather, which administrators left to provincial Emergency Alerts and Environment Canada.

Beyond a test of the system, most Hatters’ experience with the service was a message following the October 2017 windstorm that gave a general update the next morning.

Local emergency officials have access and control of Alberta Alerts, though the provincial system will not be able to target specific locations, such a neighbourhood, or a specific block, the committee heard.

“Over the last two years we haven’t really had to, and when we do, the rest of the city wants to know about it, so why not use social media?” said Brown.

When the program was adopted, the policy was decided not to use the system for relatively minor problems such as utility work and power outages so as not to cause a sort of public fatigue for messages.

At the same time, the city’s other social media networks have evolved and grown in popularity, said Brown.

The Notify Me Now program also allowed city departments to use it as a dispatching system. That was considered a key redundancy in case the main communications network at city hall was ever threatened, as it was in the 2013 flood. Brown said a new backup program is already in place.

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