Columbia County will soon be changing its emergency alert system.
In the next few weeks, the county will change from the CodeRED Alert to Hyper-Reach after having some issues with CodeRED over the last year or two, said Suzie Hughes, deputy director of the Columbia County Emergency Management Agency. Another reason for the switch is that due to constant changes in technology, the county felt it was a good time to see what else was available.
MORE: Mistrial declared in 2015 Augusta murder case
“We did that, and our team, we were comprised of the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office, EMA, traffic engineering and water utility,” Hughes said. “We are the main users of the system, although if any other department reaches out to us and says hey can we send out a community notification, we’re happy to do that as well. We demoed several different emergency notifications systems from various companies, and all decided that Hyper-Reach actually met (our) needs.”
Hyper-Reach is an emergency notification system that informs residents of local emergencies, hazards, weather and other issues that might affect them. The system is geocoded, so depending on the issue, alerts will only be sent out to those affected, not the entire county.
“Let’s just say if a specific subdivision had a scheduled water outage, whoever is sending out that, let’s just say Farmington for instance, …so the message is then created in the system and sent specifically to those residents that are signed up to receive the notifications in Farmington, it doesn’t go countywide,” Hughes said.
Hughes added the Columbia County Sheriff’s Office can use it to let citizens know of an emergency situation, such as a person at large, and if the emergency is in a specific area, just send out the alert to those registered in that area or county wide if needed.
“This is the biggest message we’re trying to get out there is please sign up,” Hughes said. “You can customize these alerts. The system does send out weather warnings. Now our agency, our public safety agencies and departments, we do not initiate those weather warnings, those come directly from the national weather service. But you have the option to opt it to receive the weather warnings or not.”
Hughes added that if residents were previously signed up for CodeRED, they need to resign up with Hyper-Reach. There are several ways to sign up, including by visiting columbiacountyga.gov and using the link on the page, scanning a QR code on the county site, calling 706-214-2704 to sign up or texting “ALERT” to 706-214-2704.
