By Ryan Huff
Inside Bay Area (California)
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All Rights Reserved
CONTRA COSTA, Calif. — Contra Costa County unveiled its new emergency telephone system on Friday that should avoid the sort of notification delays experienced in January when fire broke out at the Chevron Richmond Refinery.
The latest system, run by Honeywell International, can send residents messages within a couple of minutes, place calls in foreign languages and instantly show emergency officials which households have been reached.
The technology went into effect April 1, but the county needs public buy-in to make it work effectively, said sheriff’s Lt. Jeff Hebel, acting commander of emergency services.
“None of this means anything if people don’t trust the system,” he said. “We want to bring a higher level of reliability to the system.”
The county’s Community Warning System notifies residents of refinery emergencies, natural disasters, missing persons and other situations where information needs to be quickly relayed to nearby neighborhoods. The system passes along messages through automated telephone calls, sirens, broadcast and online media and weather radios.
In past emergencies, these notification methods have worked almost flawlessly with the exception of the phone system, which has called incorrect numbers and sometimes wrong communities during industrial accidents.
“Any technology known to man can break somehow,” said Art Botterell, Community Warning System manager. “There is no medium we have that reaches everyone in every emergency. People don’t act on a single warning message, it usually takes three impressions to get confident and take action.”
During the Jan. 15 Richmond fire, sirens went off immediately, but it took Chevron about a half-hour to provide wind direction information to county officials, helping them decide that 2,800 households could be in harm’s way of toxins.
A second half-hour delay was caused by a computer glitch with the then-vendor, Dialogic Communications. In the end, the public was never at risk to chemicals because a breeze pushed most of the smoke over San Francisco Bay rather than into neighborhoods.
County officials hope to prevent similar mix-ups with the warning protocols. Under Honeywell, the refineries can activate the system, speeding up call times. And the county can immediately see who is being called, preventing wrong communities from being notified.
“We have more control over what numbers are called and when they are called,” said Randy Sawyer, county hazardous materials programs director.
Contra Costa County is constantly looking at ways to update the system’s technology, Botterell said.
Perhaps as soon as this summer, the county hopes to be able to send emergency messages to cell phones too. Residents could voluntarily sign up to have emergency alerts sent to their mobile phones. Law enforcement would not know the person’s location, Botterell said.
A computer would automatically send out the alert, then the user’s phone would allow it through only if it’s located in the danger zone.
“Hopefully all cell phones will have chips in them soon that would work during emergencies if that community has a warning system,” said Tony Semenza, executive director of the nonprofit Contra Costa Community Awareness Emergency Response.
“If you’re in Kansas, you’d get an alert that a tornado is coming in three minutes. If you’re in Contra Costa, you’d hear about a refinery emergency.”