Residents of Lauderdale County will have a new way to receive emergency alerts and community notifications as the Lauderdale County Emergency Management Agency rolls out a new alerts system.
LEMA Director Odie Barrett said the new system, Regroup, has several advantages over Nixle, which the county currently uses for emergency alerts. One of the main improvements is the ability to target emergency alerts for specific areas of the county.
Under the current system, Barrett said, a tornado warning for Collinsville would alert everyone in Lauderdale County. Now, emergency officials can limit notifications to those in the path of the storm.
“Here it will send out alerts only to the people who are in the polygon area that the National Weather Service has drawn as far as the affected area,” he said. “So, we’re not waking everybody up in the county at two o’clock in the morning with a mass notification when it’s not in their area.”
The new system will also allow the county to phase out use of tornado sirens. Barrett said the county’s network of sirens needs repair, and it would cost taxpayers roughly $40,000 to get them all back into working order. The sirens themselves, however, don’t reach everyone and aren’t as effective as modern mass notification systems.
Lauderdale County residents wanting to receive alerts are asked to sign up by following the QR code on the Lauderdale Emergency Management Facebook page. A link will also be live on the agency’s website, lemaonline.com, in the near future.
Residents currently signed up for alerts through Nixle will also need to register for the new system.
“We’ll have it set up to where you can come into our system and select what all you get your alerts from,” he said. “So, our major emergency alerts and weather alerts, if it reaches a criteria, we can send that out to everybody.”
In addition to emergency alerts, Barrett said residents can opt in to receive community alerts about events and other things going on throughout the county and even choose to have the system call their house phone if they still have a landline.
LEMA plans to continue operating the Nixle system as well through August before beginning to phase it out, Barrett said. After that, the county will transition completely over to Regroup.