Mercer County to roll out phone alert system

CELINA - Mercer County officials in the coming months plan to roll out a new alert system to warn people of critical situations.

And unlike the Mercer County Sheriff's Office's subscription-based Nixle alert system, the Integrated Public Alert and Warning System, when put into use, will send a notification to all cellphone users within the county, Mercer County Emergency Management Agency director Chad Willrath told The Daily Standard.

"This day and age, I think having another tool in the box, so to say, to get watches and warnings out to people and get notifications out to people, I think that's always going to be a huge bonus for the county," he said.

The Mercer County Sheriff's Office, EMA and the IT department worked with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and OHIO EMA to become certified to use IPAWS, Willrath said.

IPAWS is FEMA's national system for local alerting that provides authenticated emergency and life-saving information to the public through mobile phones using Wireless Emergency Alerts and other means, according to fema.gov.

"It works very similar to like an Amber Alert," Willrath said. "It's not an Amber Alert, but basically, it's another warning system that we can have that we can get notifications out to the public."

An IPAWS alert would be activated from the Mercer County Sheriff's Office dispatch center.

"You don't have to subscribe to it," Willrath noted. "If you're driving through our area and we put out an IPAWS alert that comes through the dispatch center … and you are within our cellphone towers within Mercer County, you will get that alert."

County officials, Willrath said, will limit the use of IPAWS to five types of occurrences so as not to overwhelm and cause cellphone users to grow indifferent to the alerts. They include a missing person, a hazardous materials release necessitating a shelter-in-place or evacuation order, a 911 outage, severe weather posing an imminent threat and miscellaneous law enforcement orders.

"Because if you start sending too many of them out, then people end up maybe just turning those notifications off, and then when they need to get them, they won't get them," Willrath said about limiting the use of IPAWS.

However, Nixle would still be utilized, and Willrath encourages county residents to sign up for the free service.

"The IPAWS will be just reserved for I would say the more critical or more serious notifications that need to be made," he said, noting instances of loose animals, road closures and weather alerts would be publicized via Nixle.

IPAWS alerts would likely be ordered by Mercer County Sheriff Doug Timmerman, sometimes in consultation with other department heads, Willrath said.

"It would probably mainly be the sheriff, but we all work together pretty well. It would be pretty well pre-scripted. It would have to meet this criteria in order to send a message out," he said. "So if it's a tornado warning, that should be an automatic thing to be sent out.

"There's going to be some procedures in place or protocols in place at the dispatch center of when and where this can be used, and hopefully this should kind of keep it tight. We don't want to send too many of these out. We want to make sure when we send them out it's serious enough that we need to do that."

Willrath believes the system should be ready to go live in the next month or so.

"There's quite a bit of training that has to go with it, and then we have to get a template of the messages set up so they're similar to make it easier," he said. "There's a little bit of work to do. The big part of it's done. It's just a matter of getting the rest of it implemented."

Willrath believes IPAWS will be an important safety tool, especially during the summer when there are many people in Mercer County from outside the area.

"Mainly this time of year we have a lot of festivals, a lot of people in town from out of town. We've got a lot of people on the south side of the lake, out on the lake. The fair is coming up. Lake Festival's coming up. WoW Festival is coming up. Fort Recovery Tractor Pulls are coming up," he said. "That (tornado warning) notification gets sent out. If you're within our cell phone tower range within the county, you should get that notification."