BENTONVILLE — Phones will ring all over Benton County on Friday if the county’s emergency warning system performs as officials expect.
The county will test the Benton County Alert emergency notification system at 1 p.m. Friday, according to the county.
Josh Billis, the county’s emergency communications coordinator, said the exercise is meant to send a test message to the roughly 94,000 landlines listed with the county and to al e-mail accounts and wireless devices registered with the alert system.
Billis said the county can review the system after the test and see how many people answered their phones when the message went out and how many phones went unanswered. He said it is possible some landlines may not be registered and anyone not receiving a call on their phones should notify the county.
AT A GLANCE
Benton County Alert
Benton County Alert is an alert notification system that allows officials to immediately contact county residents, and others who register, during a major crisis or emergency and can deliver important emergency alerts, notifications and updates on a variety of devices including multiple e-mail accounts (work, home, other), wireless devices like cell phones and pagers, landlines and smart phones.
Source: Benton County Department of Emergency Services
“It’s possible some landlines aren’t in the database,” Billis said. “We need to know that.”
Marshal Watson, the county’s public safety administrator, said the list of telephone numbers in the database is updated regularly, based on information provided by telephone companies about new numbers or changes to existing numbers.
Watson said Cooper Notification, the company that provides the service for the warning system, assured officials problems with the county’s service have been corrected.
The system was activated before the Dec. 31 tornado that struck the Cincinnati community in Washington County, but warnings were only sent to e-mail addresses and other wireless devices, not to the landlines in the areas threatened by the storm.
Four Washington County residents died as a result of the storm. In Benton County, five people were injured, and 13 homes and five businesses were destroyed, the Arkansas Department of Emergency Management reported. Most of the damaged homes were in an area southeast of Siloam Springs along Arkansas 244.
In a conference call Monday, a Cooper representative said a setting that would have sent the telephone warnings out automatically was switched off and said it was done at the request of the county. County officials deny they requested the system be set that way and produced e-mails detailing discussions of the automatic tornado warning feature.
Watson said the test will provide a notification to all landlines listed in the county’s 911 database as well as registered e-mail and wireless devices. He said the data on landlines is provided by telephone companies for use in conjunction with the notification system, but people must register their e-mail addresses and wireless devices on the county Website or by going to www.bcalert.com. Accounts using e-mail addresses or wireless devices can be tailored by the person creating the account to receive a range of messages in addition to tornado warnings, Watson said.