Woodbury goes CodeRED

HIGHLAND MILLS — The Town and Village of Woodbury will spend $6,700 annually for the next three years to make sure they can alert residents when disaster - both large and small - strikes.

The village and town are sharing the cost of the three-year contract with Emergency Communications Network to license its CodeRED high-speed notification solution.

The CodeRED system provides Woodbury officials with the ability to quickly deliver messages to targeted areas or the entire community. Samples of some notifications that would be sent out include water restrictions, states of emergencies, evacuations and locations of emergencies shelters.

This includes unlimited emergency notification minutes and approximately 13,000 non-emergency minutes, Town Clerk Desiree Potvin said in the press release announcing the program.

In a telephone interview, Woodbury Supervisor John Burke said he and Woodbury Mayor Michael Queenan have talked about such a service for some time, but the flooding from last year’s hurricane and then tropical storm, followed by the fluke October snow storm, were the proverbial straws that broke the poor camel’s back.

Burke, who credited Queenan’s efforts in investigating the service, said CodeRED system was attractive because it will allow Woodbury officials to notify as many people as possible or to focus notification to a smaller section of the town or village, even down to a single street, when there’s a tree down or isolated flooding.

The CodeRED system also was selected because it gives individuals and businesses the ability to add their own phone numbers directly into the system’s database; this is an extremely important feature.

Burke noted that the system has between 50 and 60 percent of the telephone numbers of Woodbury residents through public records. However, all businesses should register, as well as all individuals who have unlisted phone numbers and/or those who have changed their phone number or address within the past year, and those who use a cellular phone or VoIP phone as their primary number.

This system allows geographically based delivery, which means street addresses are required to ensure emergency notification calls are received by the proper individuals in a given situation. The system works for cell phones, too, but the system will need to have an associated street address to provide relevant messages.

The system gives those who want to be included an easy and secure method for inputting information. Woodbury officials said the data collected will only be used for emergency notification purposes.

- Bob Quinn