Technology in touch

To keep residents informed about emergencies, the county is rolling out a free emergency text messaging system Aug. 1.
The Jay County Sheriff’s Office will begin using a mass-text system called Nixle at the beginning of the month, a system which is free for the county as well as free for users, outside of text costs that may be associated with their wireless plan.
“We’ve been looking into a mass-texting program for the last six, nine months,” said sheriff’s office chief deputy Rob Bicknell. “I was introduced to Nixle at a sheriff’s conference. It’s free of charge — there’s no charge to the customer who wants to use it other than the normal texting charges. It just seemed like the right answer to us.
“We looked into some other similar programs, but that would have been an expense to the county, this is not,” he said.
The text system will allow the sheriff’s department or Jay County Emergency Management Agency to send out alerts for such things as severe weather, missing children, missing senior citizens, major road closures or other emergencies.
Nixle allows users to customize not only what kind of information they want to receive, but also when they want to receive it and within what range of any locations they set up in their profile.
“The person signing up will be able to choose what they want to look out for, whether it be weather only, weather and traffic, missing persons, missing children, silver alerts when we have an eldery person at large who can’t be found,” Bicknell said.
“You’ll also be able to pick what times you want to be notified. If you don’t want to know that state road 67 is closed at 4 in the morning you don’t have to know that.”
“When you set up your account, you can set up your location and you can set up more than one location where you want to choose alerts from,” explained Indiana Data and Communications System coordinator and assistant 911 coordinator Amy Blakely.
“Depending on how the alert is sent out — say it’s a missing child and they want to send an alert out in a 5-mile radius — it’ll go five miles from the start point, say it’s the child’s home. Everyone within that 5-mile radius that has that set up in their own personal account will get that information.”
The county’s use of the text system will be restricted to only emergencies. For weather alerts, the county will likely only send messages for severe thunderstorm warnings, tornado watches and warnings and snow emergencies. Road closings alerts will likely be restricted to major highways like Ind. 67 or U.S. 27 in the event of serious accidents or other emergencies like downed power lines.
“You’re not going to be inundated every day with a text alert saying that ‘It’s sunny and clear out today, the temperature is now 88 degrees,’” said Jay EMA director Ralph Frazee. “You’re not going to see those kind of nuisances.”
The registration process at www.nixle.com is simple and should take less than five minutes to complete.
“It’s really easy,” Blakely said. “You just fill out your personal information and your cell phone and there are different tabs to choose who you want to receive information from and, like Rob said, at what times you want to receive it.”
Nixle offers both text and e-mail alerts, although the text version will arrive marginally faster than its e-mail counterpart.
“My e-mail comes several minutes slower than the text does,” said 911 coordinator Bill Baldwin, who said the text message should be received within a minute at most from the time it’s sent. “You’re probably at the mercy of your e-mail provider.”
“Delaware County and Wayne County both are using it and they’re both happy with it,” Frazee said. “So it’s pretty good for a large community.”
Anyone wanting more information about Nixle can visit the Jay County Sheriff’s tent at the Jay County Fair this coming week or can call Bicknell at (260) 726-8188 or Frazee at (260) 726-6909.[[In-content Ad]]