Sacramento County residents face an important deadline to remain informed in case of an emergency: On Oct. 1, Sacramento County Office of Emergency Services will delete some data from their emergency notification system, which they use to send residents alerts about fires, floods, extreme weather and missing people, among other things.
The agency is making final steps toward transitioning to a new emergency alert service called Sacramento Alert, which they started using on Jan. 1 of this year.
County officials are urging residents to either sign up for the service or update their information by visiting the citizen opt-in portal. Those who have updated their information since the county switched to Sacramento Alert on Jan. 1 do not need to do so again.
County officials say the urgency to finish the transition will help them avoid sending residents redundant notifications.
“Oct. 1 is really just our opportunity to manage some of the data within the system so that we're not over-notifying individuals,” said Mary Jo Flynn-Nevins, Chief of Emergency Services with Sacramento OES.
Sacramento Alert is also used by Placer and Yolo County emergency services officials. However, residents of these counties do not need to re-upload their contact information.
The new alert system
Conceptually, the move to this new system will not change how emergency alerts are issued, Flynn-Nevins said. She added that the data refresh and migration in October will make the new system more effective.
“Using location as one of the criteria for alerting has been available in both systems,” said Flynn-Nevins. “This is literally a technology difference between two vendors and moving data from one system to the other,” she said.
While this service largely relies on those who voluntarily provide their information, those with landline services will be registered automatically.
Relying on automatically registered landline data is not the most dependable since the information is only sometimes accurate, Flynn-Nevins said. Registering an address in the system helps locate and connect people with issues near them and helps avoid over-alerting the community.
“We do purchase 911 data and add that to our system,” Flynn-Nevins said. “However, we don't always have accurate information about the address or additional information that supports that number. So, we do ask for people to [still] subscribe.”
Who is affected?
According to Flynn-Nevins, Sacramento Alert services incorporated cities and unincorporated areas within Sacramento County. Cities themselves can also disseminate specific alerts to their communities.
“It's important to know that if your city is contacting you, they're not contacting you about a different system,” said Flynn-Nevins. “It's all the same system, but they might have a user need that is specific to your neighborhood in your city. Same thing for unincorporated county areas in Sacramento County.”
Notifications from the new alert system cover the same range of emergencies, including flooding, fires, levee failures, severe weather, road closures, missing person reports and evacuation notices.
How to stay informed
Alert services like Sacramento Alert are a vital safety measure in ensuring that community members get pertinent crisis-related information specific to where they are, Flynn-Nevins said.
Sacramento OES will be testing the system on Oct. 19 at 10:19 a.m. County officials said subscribers will be notified by receiving an email, phone call, text message — or all three, depending on how users register.
For more information about how to register or update your Sacramento Alert account — and more resources that Sacramento OES provides — the department maintains an informational website.
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