Published: April 30, 2007 11:02 am      

Code RED

Test of city services goes off without a hitch

By Jim Goodson

editor@jacksonvilleprogress.com

The first test of Jacksonville’s CodeRED service went off without a hitch, city officials said Friday.

A total of 1,520 city homes were called and 937 were reached - about 61 percent, Jacksonville Fire Chief Rodney Kelley said. It only took four minutes to reach those homes.

“If you didn’t get a call from us at 10 a.m. this morning and you want to be a part of the network, either go to our website and sign up or drop by city hall, the fire department or the police department.”

The city’s Web site, www.jacksonville-texas.com, has a CodeRED link at the bottom left corner of the main page.

According to Kelley, several groups of people will most likely not be getting a call Friday morning.

“If you have an unlisted number or if you have changed your number in the past year – we probably won’t have your number. If you are a business, we probably don’t have you in the system yet. If you use a cell phone as your primary number, you won’t be in the system either,” he said. “People on the lake, or who live on the fringes of the city limits, probably still need to sign up.”

More than 1,500 Jacksonville households are already included in the CodeRED database.

CodeRED is capable of calling cell phones, and the system should call back any numbers that it fails to reach the first time.

“This thing can be used for virtually everything – weather advisories, bomb threats, gas leaks, missing children – our options are unlimited,” Kelley said. “If we had a major water leak and the people were required to boil their water, if we told the newspaper that we had issued a boil water notice, the people wouldn’t know about it until tomorrow. This is an immediate way of informing the people about emergency situations.”

Kelley said more and more municipalities are acquiring reverse 9-1-1 services.