City Looking For Ways To Improve Emergency Phone Warnings
Written by 991KBU on July 22, 2019
Malibu’s city hall has issues with the way its disaster alerting system works.
It is asking companies with experience in handling direct phone call … reverse 911 and wide area cellphone activation system to submit proposals.
For years … the city has used a company called Everbridge to handle phone call activations.
Malibu late last week issued a request for proposals from companies to deliver a high-speed, vendor-hosted, automated communication system.
The system would deliver emergency notifications by voice, text and email to all types of devices.
The system should also issue alerts over multiple protocols and devices and be capable of issuing broadcast and cable systems … something the city has never attempted.
The city’s existing system … Everbridge … functioned very poorly when it was first tested after the Woolsey Fire.
It became apparent during the tests that it had never been programmed correctly … and it choked when it was tested the first time.
Since then … thousands of new cell phone numbers for Malibu phones have been added to the system … and it has been fine tuned to work better.
City emergency service director Susan Duenas says the last test showed it to be working much better.
About 40 thousand phone lines were tested,
About 20 percent of the messages to cellphones went through and were responded to as received.
