Communities get social during emergencies

17.10.2012
If there's a brush fire or earthquake in California's Ventura County, city officials could be getting critical information from Twitter and residents could be receiving warnings on their smartphones.

For , this county system is getting social.

Officials in Ventura County, with 875,000 residents in Southern California, needed a way to reach people - whether all of them or just specific neighborhoods -- in the event of emergencies. The problem is that calling people's home phones isn't always effective. If residents are at work or on the road or simply too busy to pick up the phone, they might not hear about an evacuation or other warning.

Now county officials are working to get around that problem by using Everbridge's Interactive Visibility software as a service.

Glendale, Calif.-based Everbridge launched its first emergency outreach system, which only provided recorded messages to people's landlines, in 2002. Last month, the system was updated with social capabilities.

With this service, Patrick Maynard, program administrator and alert and warning coordinator for the Ventura County Sheriff's Office, is able to contact people over their landlines or on their cell phones, by email, instant message or text message.