El Paso Emergency Alert System: Work In Progress

The El Paso Emergency Alert System is the county’s high-tech way of keeping its citizens safe, but the program isn’t perfect.

“We’re still working on tweaking some things,” Lt. Richard Gonzalez told ABC-7. Gonzalez is the Assistant Coordinator for El Paso’s Emergency Management.

Here’s how it works: users register online to receive texts, e-mails and phone calls in emergency situations.

“A job that used to be done through police officers and firefighters door to door can now be done through computers and phone lines,” said Detective Mike Baranyay, a spokesperson for the El Paso Police Department.

Gonzalez said this particular system, which is less than a year old, has been successful despite some difficulties. Some users have told ABC-7 they get certain emergency messages late or not at all. Other users have said they’ve received the same message multiple times.

At first, the system reached users by contacting them based on geographic areas designated by emergency officials. “Before, we had to draw a pattern. We might have missed some people ourselves or we might have doubled (some of the areas in the patterns). That’s the reason some people didn’t get messages or got too many (of the same kind),” said Gonzalez.

Now they use zip codes to make things more efficient.

There’s also another reason some users get messages that others may not receive. Gonzalez explained some emergency messages are designed to notify residents in a particular area of dangerous situations. Therefore, officials limit the messages to certain neighborhoods.

What warrants an alert? Gonzalez said it can be a number of things including evacuations, natural or man mande disasters, hazardous material incidents, and border violence incidents. Fire and police departments can request that a message be sent out at the discretion of a supervisor on the scene.

“It’s a system that’s used in a case by case basis when it’s appropriate,” said Det. Baranyay.

Officers felt the use of an alert was appropriate over the weekend when an elderly man was fouind wondering alone without his family. The El Paso Police Department issued an alert so the man’s family may be located. The man told officers he thought he lived near the star on the mountain, so alerts were sent out to users who listed they lived near there.

However, two other elderly gentlemen were also picked up that same weekend by police. So why weren’t any alerts sent on their behalf to find their families?

“The other 2 incidents, those gentlemen did not indicate any specific area of town that they lived in so it wouldn’t have been as good of a use of the system considering we would have had to call it out to the whole city,” explained Branyay.

Gonzalez said the system has already been helpful in some incidents, including a gas line rupture where more than 100 residents had to be evacuated. Gonzalez also said emergency officials have been working with the alert system provider to make the system as effective as possible for the people of El Paso.

“We have a version of the registration website in Spanish for Spanish-speakers,” said Gonzalez. “That’s one of the things we’ve worked out with the (provider) to improve the system.”

The system currently has about 235,000 users. Officials encourage everyone in the county to sign up. You can register at EPEmergencyAlert.com.