Fire, police, city, and emergency management agency leaders all appear to be in agreement that expansion of the Nixle alerting system now being used by Salem, Centralia and Sandoval is the best option for delivering emergency messages to all Marion County residents.
A lengthy discussion on the topic was held as part of a special Marion County Board committee Tuesday night created to look at better communications of severe weather information.
County Board Chair Debbie Smith explains the next step.
“It’s a secondary system we think we need right now because of the sirens, some of them work and some don’t. And they are so antiquated and old, repair parts are hard to get so they get new parts and have to tweak them to apply to the old equipment. So with Nixle what I was going to do was complete a survey form sending it out to the townships and municipalities in Marion County to see if they would be interested in it. It is a cost of $8000 per year for the County.”
Smith says the bulk of the cost could be split between Centralia, Salem and the county board for the rural areas. The smaller communities would only face a small yearly expense. All jurisdictions would have administrative options to inform residents of specific issues just impacting their residents. Options would be available for cell phone and landline notification as well as text messages and e-mails.
Smith says the county has no problem with communities wanting to maintain their warning sirens, but says cost is a problem.
“To get a new siren would be almost $40,000 right now and they are just putting Band-Aids on them to keep them going because a lot of municipalities don’t have the revenue to pay for the siren repair. This would reach a large span of people. All they would have to do is log in and tell what kind of alerts they want. We’ve been told it’s a very simplified system.”
Smith hopes to have the survey results back so they can be reviewed at the committee’s next meeting at six pm on November 29th in the county board room in the basement of the law enforcement center.
