Warning plan tests phone links.

Byline: REBECCA NOLAN The Register-Guard

If you think your phone rings off the hook now, just wait until mid-June, when Lane County tests its telephone warning system.

As many as 130,000 telephones will ring within minutes of each other as the county pushes the limits of its Community Emergency Notification System, a sort of reverse 911 that calls citizens when there's an emergency, instead of the other way around.

In December 1999, Lane County became the first county in the nation to acquire the type of system developed by Intrado of Boulder, Colo. The computer-based system allows emergency dispatchers to ring all the telephones within any geographic area and deliver a pre-recorded message with emergency warnings or instructions.

The system draws from a database of telephone numbers that is refreshed every 24 hours and includes unlisted, as well as listed, numbers for all businesses and residences.

It can make as many as 2,000 calls per minute, officials said. If no one answers or the line is busy, it will call back once, five minutes later. The system will leave a message on an answering machine.

Previously, local agencies relied on warning sirens, the radio- and television-based Emergency Broadcast System and door-to-door warnings in case of emergency, said Lane County Sheriff Jan Clements.

"The system was absolutely archaic," Clements said. "This is probably a thousand times or 2,000 times more effective."

Locally, telephone warnings have been sent out 13 times for incidents such as hostage situations, wildfire threats in the Coburg Hills, hazardous materials spills, and armed and dangerous suspects on the loose.

Each time, the system contacted at most a few hundred people. Typically, 80 percent to 85 percent of the calls were received and heard by someone at the phone number, said Galen Howard, 911 coordinator for the Lane Council of Governments.

The biggest test thus far was a simulated reaction to an imaginary flood on the McKenzie River that dialed 5,000 phones, Howard said.

Other than a few people angry that the sheriff or police called their home, feedback has been positive, Howard said.

The June simulation is part of a multi-state test of Intrado's system. The company hasn't yet chosen an exact date, but will notify the county a few days beforehand.

Clements recorded the test message Thursday. "This is a test of the Community Emergency Notification System," it begins.

Howard urged residents who receive the calls to listen to the entire message so the system records it as delivered.

During the test, the system won't differentiate between residential numbers and those of businesses, hospitals or schools. The county will encourage such institutions to use the test as a starting point for their own drills.

When the county bought the system in 1999, it formed a series of partnerships with private companies including Borden Chemical, Georgia Pacific Corp., Hynix, Sony Disc Manufacturing, and Weyerhaeuser, as well as a number of public municipalities and agencies. They all contributed to the $85,000 start-up and first-year costs and annual costs of about $50,000 for the next two years.

But that three-year agreement will end in December, said Howard, and the county is looking for additional partners to pony up cash in the future.

While effective on the whole, the system does have a few shortcomings, officials said.

It can't penetrate certain kinds of call-blockers or private, in-house telephone networks of the sort used by larger businesses. It also doesn't ring through on telephones equipped with devices for the hearing impaired. Caller ID devices also pose problems.

All supervisors at the Central Lane 911 Center, where the notification system is housed, have been trained how to initiate the warning system when an incident commander makes a request.

Kristi Wilde, director of Central Lane 911, said it takes about 20 minutes from when the incident commander requests a notification to when people's phones start ringing.

The agency requesting the notification pays a per-call fee of about 30 cents to 90 cents for each call delivered. In case of a crisis caused by a particular entity, such as a chemical leak or hazardous spill, that entity pays the per-call fees.