Emergency Response works to promote use of SIREN

Avid readers of Tompkins Weekly may remember a small photo brief we published back in March announcing the launch of SIREN, the county’s new emergency and urgent alert system (tinyurl.com/2g6wwqkq). Now, about three months later, the system is in full swing, and county officials are encouraging residents who used the old system to sign up before the end of the year to continue receiving alerts.

Geoff Dunn, community preparedness coordinator and public information officer at the Tompkins County Department of Emergency Response, explained that prior to SIREN — which stands for Safety & Incident Real-Time Emergency Notifications — the department used a notification system called Swift911.

“It was probably about, I think, 2017 that that got going,” he said. “And Swift was acquired by a company called Rave Mobile Safety. And now, Rave is in the midst of transitioning all of those Swift911 customers over to the Rave alert platform. And as it turns out, they’ve put a deadline on that as the end of this year. So, we were being a little proactive.”

All users previously signed up for Swift911 automatically started receiving their alerts through SIREN when the switch was made, but Dunn said that folks should still make a SIREN-specific account.

“Information [that] got carried over is really just the contact information and not their preferred lists of notifications,” he said. “So, this is an opportunity to clean that all up. But at the same time, if you have not gone in and created your own account through SIREN, then at the end of the year, you risk not getting alerts because that information that had carried over from Swift911 will be no longer applicable, no longer valid.”

The switch from Swift911 to SIREN goes beyond a name change, as Dunn explained. On a basic level, switching to SIREN meant that the county could handle its branding in house, which turned out to be a fun project for those involved.

“We were able to custom brand the system, so that’s why Dominick Recckio, our county communications director, worked very hard on the branding of this,” he said. “And he came up with an acronym, as we all do in Ithaca, SIREN. … If you look at the logo, there’s also a reference to the sirens of Greek mythology and, in particular, Odysseus’s return to Ithaca in the Odyssey. So, … maybe folks in Ithaca are the only ones that are going to really appreciate that, but it’s sort of served a two purpose there.”

In addition to the aesthetic changes, SIREN is far more user-friendly than Swift911, Dunn said.

“It’s a very simple process; it’s three steps,” he said.

To sign up, residents can visit tompkinscountyny.gov/siren or text SIREN to 67283. They may also register by contacting the Department of Emergency Response at (607) 266-2633 or emailing SIREN@tompkins-co.org. From there, users provide some personal information like phone number and address. Then, users choose what kind of alerts they want to receive and on what platform.

“You can log back at any time and change any of that,” Dunn added. “So, if your circumstances change — your address changes — you have the ability to do that very easily. You’re managing your account, not us. And that’s the beauty of it. Swift911, we were managing it. But now, here, the residents can make changes on the fly.”

As far as what sorts of alerts users can expect, Dunn said folks can choose from a wide range of options, including emergency alerts and community notices.

“The whole purpose is to make sure that we have some way to notify a high number of people in a short period of time in the event there is imminent danger or some kind of emergency situation,” he said. “But it’s not only used for that. A lot of municipalities like to use it just for basic information about road construction, water main breaks, things that would be of more of an urgent nature but not to the level of an emergency.”

There’s also considerable internal uses for SIREN among local organizations and businesses, Dunn said.

“For example, the state police and Bangs Ambulance, they both use SIREN for internal messaging for their employees or for their officers,” he said. “And the county and the city both have internal lists as well.”

Dunn said that so far, the reception to the new system has been positive.

“Nobody likes change, as we all know, but I was impressed with the number or the lack of folks who had any issues,” he said. “I have a lot of comments from folks who said, ‘That was easy.’ Presentations I would make to governmental bodies and whatever, and I’d say, ‘Hey, how many people have signed up?’ And … a lot of them said they did. I said, ‘But how easy [was it]?’ — ‘Oh, simple. No problem.’ And so, … it was comforting to know that it was a system that people were comfortable with. So, that was good. The lack of any complaints was very positive from our perspective.”

Over the next several months, residents can expect to see significantly more publicity regarding SIREN as Dunn and others encourage folks to sign up.

“We’re going to be trying to spend as much of the summer and into the early fall as we really need to get folks to create their profiles in SIREN because, as I said before, at the end of the year, any information that had carried over from Swift is no longer be valid,” he said. “So, those folks who hadn’t taken the next step and created their own SIREN profile are at risk of not receiving any notifications. So, I think there’ll be some social media pushes.”

For more information on SIREN, visit tompkinscountyny.gov/siren.

Jessica Wickham is the managing editor of Tompkins Weekly. Send story ideas to them at editorial@VizellaMedia.com.