Crisis Call! It could be your neighborhood

Phil Pfuehler
River Falls Journal Staff
Published Friday, Oct. 24, 2008

Emergencies come in all shapes and sizes. Often we learn about them after the fact. Yet there are times when knowing about them earlier — as they unfold — would help people react more wisely and feel safer.

Enter CityWatch.

“This is a new tool for quick, effective notification,” River Falls Police Chief Roger Leque said. “We can now communicate with the whole city or target a certain neighborhood.” What this emergency system can do is call land-line phones of city residents and deliver brief, timely messages.

For what reason?

Leque said examples include alerting citizens about the last location of a missing child or a wandering Alzheimer’s patient; an evacuation because of a chemical spill; a search for a dangerous suspect or an active shooting situation. “These will be for discretionary uses in serious types of situations,” Leque said. “We’ll be very careful before deciding to make these calls. This is not a general notification system.”

CityWatch has been in the planning stages since last year. Leque — also the city’s Emergency Management director — pushed for this plan after serving as co-chair to the state task force on campus safety following the deadly Virginia Tech University shootings.

CityWatch, a division of Bloomington, Minn.,-based Avtex, specializes in alert notification systems and services via phone, pager, fax, e-mail and text messaging.

The new CityWatch hardware is located at the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department in Ellsworth. River Falls as well as UW-River Falls are linked. Leque said the city paid about $10,500 in startup costs. He added there will be future costs associated with maintaining and updating the system. “The communication is built around the 911-system’s telephone data and the city’s GIS (computerized) mapping system,” Leque said. Funding to help pay for the area program also came from Xcel Energy, which has a nuclear power plant in Red Wing, Minn.

Leque said CityWatch has other applications. “We are creating other emergency notification groups,” Leque said, adding these include city employees from the police, fire, ambulance and public works departments. Further, within these groupings certain persons can be reached, depending on the emergency. Leque wants city residents to know what CityWatch is and what it’s designed for.

“What we don’t want to do is create panic, or for people to think these are fake or crank calls,” he said. Homes with caller I.D. can identify CityWatch emergency calls. The phone’s I.D. panel will read: “Pierce Cnty Alert.” It should also show a 273-prefix phone number since the call originates in Ellsworth with the sheriff’s department. Leque also said CityWatch may evolve as the database of contact information expands.

CityWatch is also poised to operate at UW-RF, according to Blake Fry, special assistant to the chancellor. Like the city, the university invested $10,500. Fry said CityWatch has been tested but never used for a real emergency.

On campus, cell phones rule because that’s what students and many professors use. Therefore, CityWatch will transmit cell phone messages. However, CityWatch messages will also be sent to the office phone numbers of staff and faculty. Said Fry: “We can specify which method to use or do all of them, even faxing.” Fry said actually connecting with students is a challenge. In the past the university has sent out campus-wide e-mail announcements, but that doesn’t mean they’re read.

“So what we’re looking to do is create redundancies in our communications to improve our chances of getting though,” he said. “Today, students have so many distractions from Facebook to text messaging that they don’t always check their e-mails.” Going beyond CityWatch, Fry said that the university is installing a network of emergency broadcast boxes that will function as a campus PA system.

“We want to reach as many students and staff as possible with instructions on a crisis that may involve an evacuation or taking shelter, and then later also giving them the all clear,” Fry said.

Dick Trende, UW-RF Public Safety director, and Interim Chancellor Connie Foster, are key administrators making decisions about when and what to say before a CityWatch message goes out.