City Activates CodeRED Emergency Call System

If you receive, or have already received, a recorded phone call about a "Code Red emergency," never fear: This is only a test.

But from now on, in the event of a real emergency affecting Wauwatosa, real calls will go out over the newly activated CodeRED Emergency Notification System to residents and businesses throughout Wauwatosa.

Calls began in the morning Monday and were to continue until the entire existing phone database for Wauwatosa was attempted. The test calls give city staff a chance to operate the system as if there had been a need for community-wide notification.

However, for any individual citizen or businessperson, the system is only as good as the information it has in that database. So everyone is being asked, in the test call, on the city website and here, in the media, to please visit the CodeRED registry and provide your correct and preferred contact information.

If, for instance, your database contact is a landline, possibly a cancelled one, you can change that and get mobile notification to a cell phone, or to multiple phones, and get them via text and email as well as voice.

Mayor Kathy Ehley strongly recommends that “all individuals and businesses should take the time to visit our website and add contact information to include cellular phones and other non-traditional phones as well as email and text addresses."

"If your contact information is not in the database," Ehley said, "you will not receive a call when an urgent message is sent.”

In particular, businesses should register, as well as individuals who have unlisted phone numbers, who have changed their phone number recently, and those who use a cellular phone exclusively or have VoIP phones (such as Vonage) as their primary numbers, Ehley said.

Ehley urged citizens to go to the City of Wauwatosa website at www.wauwatosa.net and follow the CodeRED link in the middle of the page.

Required information includes a street address (physical address, no P.O. boxes) for location purposes and a primary phone number. Additional phone numbers, email and text addresses may also be entered.

A test of the test

Wauwatosa Patch decided to register for all available (free) features, and found the process pretty easy and highly functional – albeit not entirely seamless.

CodeRED is operated under contract with the city by Emergency Communications Network. The link on the city website takes you quickly to ECN's registration page, where entering your required and optional information is clearly presented and simple to do.

My first attempt to "continue" past the info page met with an error message saying I'd entered an invalid email address. I hadn't – somehow the system changed the email address to my name.

The bug, though, disappeared with one repetition. Upon entering the email address a second time, it "took" and moved me on to a verification page.

There, another small problem was encountered – the database did not recognize my address as a known Wauwatosa address. However, a small zoomable map offered me the opportunity to move a little balloon icon from the middle of the Village to my actual address on 60th Street.

To my surprise, my lot and those of several of my neighbors up the street were shown as parkland – which they were until, oh, around 1960-something (my home was completed in 1967). Apparently, ECN's map needs a bit of an update.

At any rate, the system did allow me to drop my home onto the fringe of Jacobus Park, and I have faith that the police and fire departments know that my neighbors and I exist and how to find us.

I was asked whether I wanted to launch a test call, and that went flawlessly. The call came within seconds and the message was clear and to the point, with no beating around the bush or asking whether I wanted to pay for upgraded features.

Finally, I was offered the opportunity to download a free CodeRED app for my phone. This actually went much more smoothly than many a phone app installation.

You can get the app for either iPhone or Android systems. Speaking only for the iPhone version, it downloaded quickly to my computer and synched instantly and automatically to my phone – something I can't say for many applications.

The app worked fine, too, although I had to re-register just my email address and password to get in – it would have been nice if ECN had recognized me as a new user and just let me log in.

Once in, I found a menu in "settings" of different types of alerts I can receive besides Community Alerts from the city – severe weather, high winds, heat, cold, flood, etc. – plus options on my alert sound, vibrate with alert, and warning radius up to 10 miles.

That's all for free. Users can upgrade their subscription for $4.99, but it appears that everything you could need as a Wauwatosa user is already there for nothing.

To the notion that, in an emergency, nothing is more important than getting notification and information as quickly as possible, wherever you are, I recommend following Mayor Ehley's advice and registering your preferred contact information and taking advantage of the system's mobile features.