On Wednesday (March 12) the Cariboo Regional District tested its Emergency Notification System.
Manager of Communications Gerald Pinchbeck said overall the test was successful.
“We had over a 95 percent success rate with delivering our notifications. There were a few issues where we either had not in service phone numbers for voice calls, voice calls that went to busy line or went unanswered.” Pinchbeck said. “Contacts to cell phone numbers that were out of service at the time when the notification was sent. As the days go on we (CRD) expect that those numbers will increase as people come back into service with their cell phones.”
Pinchbeck noted that over the last month the Cariboo Regional District had 530 new subscribers in total and 132 had just signed up on that Wednesday during the test.
Now that test has come and gone we asked Pinchbeck what’s next moving forward with the data they collected.
“There are some things we found during the test that we’re taking back to Voyent Alert. They’re going to be looking into some of the lessons learned through this test, some of the issues that cropped up on the technical side with some of the notification deliveries and working to resolve that.”
Pinchbeck said to make sure that you have more than one contact method registered.
“We had a lot of people that only received the notification by email or they received a text but not a phone call. During a wildfire or flood emergency you might not be at your home or have access to your email account and we want to be able to make sure to notify you if you’re impacted by an Evacuation Order Alert” Pinchbeck added.
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