By GARRET JAROS/YachatsNews
The emergency management division of the Lincoln County Sheriff’s Office will conduct a countywide test of its emergency notification system between 9 a.m. and 1 p.m. Friday.
The test gives emergency managers an opportunity to check all components of the system in preparation for summer wildfire conditions. Notifications will be sent via phone calls, texts and emails to people who have signed up to receive them.
Lincoln County residents can participate in several ways prior, during and after the test.
Prior to the test, residents are encouraged to create a Lincoln Alerts profile if they do not already have one. Then confirm receipt of the notification during the test.
And finally, residents can help by completing a feedback survey that can be reached through a link that will be sent in the notification.
One thing to be aware of is that once confirmed, residents with multiple phone numbers, texts and emails on their profile, will not be sent alerts to their other devices, which is why everyone in a household should have their own profile.
Notifications are automatically sent to established land lines in the county as well as most cellular numbers linked to the area whether residents create a profile or not. The information is provided through 911-type services. Some mobile phones can have issues however if the number is recycled and linked to an incorrect address.
“So that’s why we encourage people to sign up,” said Jenny Demaris, the county’s emergency manager. “If you don’t sign up with web registration you don’t really have a guarantee. Our notifications are based on the geographic area so that way we are not notifying the whole county that something is happening on the main street in Waldport.”
Residents can also list more than one address on a profile, for example they could list their workplace, children’s school, second property and parents’ address who lives in the county so they can receive notifications for those areas.
There are 22,093 households in Lincoln County, according to census data and the Lincoln Alerts system has 17,000 web registrations.
“We probably have one of the highest web registrations per capita in the entire state because of how proactive we’ve been in advertising our system and we’ve had it since 2011,” Demaris said.
The county alert system is part of OR Alerts so residents creating a profile should check by using their email to be sure they don’t already have one.
To create a profile and learn more go to the county’s emergency management website.
Well, I guess we know how the test went. I think I now feel more nervous about county agencies responding to a disaster than I did before the test.