Fire Department to Debut Emergency Mass Notification System

The Arcadia Fire Department, which runs the city's Emergency Operations Center during major disasters, will adopt a new emergency mass notification system this spring.

"[The system] will give us another tool to use to notify the community," Battalion Chief Barry Spriggs told Patch.

The Station Fire and the 2011 windstorm made it clear to city leaders that Arcadia would need a better way to communicate with residents during large-scale emergencies.

The city relied upon the Arcadia Unified School District's mass notification system to disseminate warming center information during the windstorm. Still, that was a marked improvement from the year before, when the city resorted to hand-delivering evacuation notices and incident updates to residents affected by the Station Fire. 

The new $30,000 system by Blackboard Connect will allow fire and Public Works Department officials to create a voicemail with critical communique that gets sent directly to residents' phones. The system will also send text messages to registered users.

Spriggs said the system should be up and running by April or May.