 I'm Leslie McVane, welcome to CTN member highlights. Today my guest is Bill Holmes, the director of the Cumberland County Communication Center. Hi, Bill. Good morning. Well, thank you for joining me. We're gonna talk about something that maybe a lot of people haven't heard about and it's called Code Red. It's a mass communication internet thing. You wanna explain a little bit about what it is? Certainly, Leslie, first of all, thank you for having us in this morning. This is an important project for us. We really appreciate CTN's cooperation in helping us get this word out to the community. So Code Red is an emergency alert warning system that's used by all of the 28 communities in Cumberland County and their public safety agencies to get an emergency message out to the citizens of Cumberland County that they might need to know. And some of the examples that we give of messages that we do would be severe weather hazards such as a tornado or a hurricane, dangerous persons in the community that might be in and out in your neighborhood, evacuation notices, things along those lines, for example, if there were a gas leak and the fire department wanted to evacuate a certain area, they would contact us and we'd put that message onto Code Red to get it out to the citizens. Another one that's been used recently is with the Portland Water District. When they've had water main breaks, they've asked to use the system to get the message out to citizens for a boil-water-only message. So those are some of the types of messages that the system sends out for emergency alerts to the citizens. And we send it out in many different venues, either a voice message or email message or a text message. And also landline. In landline, yes. Because some people are still in that era. Exactly. Statistically, at our 9-1-1 center, 66% of the 9-1-1 calls that we get come in via cell phone. So the other 33% is coming in via landline. What we've found recently is that when Fairpoint does their automatic updates once a month, they update all of the 9-1-1 landlines automatically. It happens every time somebody moves. So we get a monthly update of those. But what the challenge for us in Cumberland County has been in regard to the Code Red system is to reach as many people as we possibly can. Currently, we only have about 3,000 people that are signed up with their cell phone to receive those emergency alerts. And obviously, the system is only as good as the amount of people that we can reach with that message. And so we've partnered with Cumberland County EMA, Portland EMA, and also the Federal Emergency Management Agency on a program called Preparathon to try to get as many people to opt in their cell phone number to the system as possible. So we've partnered with business groups, faith-based groups, a lot of other groups. Well, you've got the United Way of Portland is a sort of stakeholder in this as well as some of the neighborhood associations. People that people know, organizations people know who are really buying into this. Yeah, and apparently, according to FEMA's research that they've done, the more people that we can get involved in our community to get that message out to their employees, to their coworkers, to the people that they interact with, the more credibility the system has. And so we're anxious to see if we can reach our goal, which is to, on August 7th, we're gonna do a county-wide test. So again, emphasizing that currently we have 3,000 citizens that have opted their cell phone number in. And we haven't set a specific number of a goal, but on August 7th, we'll put out a county-wide test, and that test will let us know how successful we've been on this campaign to have all of those people that are working with us and with FEMA to get that message to our citizens to opt in their cell phone number. And some of the emergencies that you're talking about are really life-threatening emergencies that I've often wondered, how do you let people know the water main break? That was a very dangerous thing for people drinking water that may have been polluted. How does that work? With something like this, people are connected, you're gonna get through to them. You know, Leslie, thank you. It's an awesome system. It really is. It's a system we hope not to have to use, but it's a system that we hope that when we have to use it, we can reach as many people with that message as we possibly can. For example, the example that you've given with the water district, they experienced just a little bit of frustration because they wanted to reach more people, but after giving the boil water order, we're notified a day or two later that some folks didn't get the message. So they've asked us to work with them, and we have jumped in with both feet to do all that we can to get as many people in. Some of the ways that it does work with our public safety agencies is when they have an incident, let's say that there were a gas leak in the community, and the fire department wanted to evacuate a one-mile radius of that location. So they would contact us, and on our computer system, the Code Red system, we can draw a one-mile radius around there, and those phone calls would go out to everybody who's registered, first of all, their landline, but also their cell phone. Even if they happened to, let's say it's in the town of Wyndham, but they happened to live in Portland, they would still get that message while they're working in Portland. They would still get that message on their cell phone in Portland that around their home, there's this gas leak and evacuation notice. And if they had someone visiting from somewhere else who would get that, they would be able to help them. Exactly, so it's a great system. Again, we hope not to have to use it, but when we use it, it's very effective. And you know, natural disasters, we never know when that's gonna happen, leaks happen. But to be aware and to be prepared, we all wanna be on the safe side. Now, to sign up for this, it doesn't cost anything. No, it's absolutely free, obviously it's optional, you don't have to, but we encourage as many people to. And the only thing that folks would need to do is to go to CumberlandCounty.org website. And at the very bottom of the website, there's a code red icon. And if they log into the icon, just get into the icon, it'll open up the registration, and just really three specific things, your name, your address, and your cell phone number. Excuse me, once you've completed that registration, from that day forward, based on your address, if there are any emergencies in that region, you'll get that notification of the address. And it only goes to the emergency people. It's not shared with anyone else, your information, because people are really concerned about things like that now. So it's just really for your own safety. It's for public safety and public awareness. One of the more common ones that we use the system for, and actually it's been very successful, all too often we get reports of elderly folks or folks with dementia that have left the home and are lost. And you'd be surprised how quickly using that system, folks see those persons in the neighborhood and call in, and we're able to recover them very quickly. And that's always scary when you read about that in the paper. Well, I think it's great. Do you want to say any last thing as we're wrapping up here? I mean, it sounds like a wonderful program. No, other than to add this, first of all, once again, to emphasize we can't thank CTN enough. This is very nice for you to work with Cumberland County to help us get this message out. Obviously, you can see the importance of the system. And it's our challenge to get as many people to opt in as we can so that the system can be as effective as it possibly could be. So once again, we thank you. And again, we'd urge folks to log into CumberlandCounty.org, go to the Code Red icon and fill in the information and sign up for Code Red. I'm going to go do it. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Bill. Appreciate it.