With waters expected to rise in the next few week, it’s important to know if your area will be affected.
Gallatin County Emergency Management offers a Community Notification System that lets officials send out alerts when there’s an emergency.
“Examples of that would be wildfires with evacuations, special response team activities where they have some sort of dangerous situation going on with law enforcement, or it could even be something a little less life threatening like a contaminated water supply issue, it could be a lost child.” Gallatin County Emergency Management Director Patrick Lonergan said.
This tool is designed to target the specific area of Gallatin County that’s affected.
“It’s a geo-targeted system, so it’s not like we light up every phone in the county. We draw an area on a map and we notify the people we have contact information for inside that box.” Lonergan said.
You can sign up for the Community Notification System on the Gallatin County Emergency Management website.
“The real value is when people register and they tell us their cell phone numbers, if they have an internet phone, their emails. That information, that’s not publicly accessible, that people actually use,” Lonergan said.
Another way to receive alerts is to download the Everbridge app on your Apple or Android device. In addition to getting alerts from wherever you request on the website, you can also get alerts wherever you are at the current moment.
Gallatin County has offered this service since the summer of 2016 when they sent out alerts on the Maple Fire in Yellowstone.
