The Butte County Sheriff’s Office is changing how it delivers emergency notifications, and urging residents to sign up for the new system.
The office previously used CodeRED, but the service has been experiencing an outage for about a week. The disruption convinced the sheriff’s office to move to using RAVE Mobile Safety’s Smart 911 system instead, something they’ve been considering for about a year.
Jim Beller, the sheriff’s emergency management lieutenant, said RAVE is more robust and offers alerts in more languages than CodeRED.
“I really like that because then people can get notified in the language that they speak that they're most familiar with. And that's better for everybody, they can digest that information much easier that way,” Beller said.
Like CodeRED, users can opt in to receive notifications via email, text messages and voice messages.
The office hopes to collect contact information for county residents from local utility companies to automatically sign them up in a way that complies with state codes. But Beller says to sign up yourself if you want to ensure you’re in the system and to customize your preferences.
“It's the best way, because if we just upload what we get from the utility company into RAVE, we're not going to know what language you want to be notified in. We're not going to know all of those important things that can tailor it to someone's personal needs,” Beller said.
In addition to information about disasters, the new system can also notify residents about other incidents, like missing people.
“If there's something of concern that doesn't rise to the level of a disaster that we need to get out to the public, we can use RAVE for that,” Beller said.
Beller said it's important to sign up for the new RAVE alert system in case other communication methods like social media or emergency radios crash. Only about 23% of Butte County residents had signed up to receive emergency alerts under the previous system, according to data gathered by NSPR this summer.
The sheriff’s office is encouraging everyone to sign up for the new system here.
