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City looks to discontinue Notify Me Now system

Nov 13, 2018 | 3:19 PM

 

MEDICINE HAT, AB — There was a big push to get Notify Me Now into the hands of Hatters.

Text messages and phone calls would be sent out in an emergency and would help get critical information out as quickly as possible, as long as residents had taken the time to sign up for the notifications.

The Notify Me Now system was brought forward to the corporate services committee on Tuesday, with the intention of scrapping it altogether.

“My liking of Notify Me Now was that it was very user based. You have to take interest in it, you had to subscribe to it and there by, you became directly a part of that management system,” said committee chair Robert Dumanowski.

The Alberta Emergency Alert app launched in 2014. An update to the software earlier this means critical information is sent out to more people a faster than Notify Me Now.

“Within the system, we only have the ability to push so many calls out at a time, so we were roughly at 100 calls per minute,” said Merrick Brown, director of health, safety, environment and emergency management.

“It can take a considerable amount of time to push out something very, very critical, whereas Alberta Emergency Alert uses wireless public alerting or the wireless broadcast messaging.”

The city has slowly turned to using social media to release information to the public.

“Relying on social media is a logical platform, but it’s one that I believe is filled with a lot of distraction and may not necessarily get to the end user as quickly as Notify Me Now did,” Dumanowski added.

While it may not be as fast, it is working.

Brown adds that in an emergency event, city staff will use all means necessary to get information out.

“People want to know now, we can’t wait four hours for the calls to get picked up for an evacuation to occur,” he said.

“I’m hoping that the Alberta Emergency Alert management system will have the same kind of ability for us to respond in a nimble and quick fashion,” Dumanowski said.