Emergency alert changes result from Waldo Canyon fire

The El Paso-Teller County 911 Authority upgraded its emergency notification system a year after it didn’t work properly during the June 2012 Waldo Canyon fire.

Authority spokesman Ben Bills discussed the matter earlier this week on the fourth anniversary of the fire.

Bills said the authority learned a month after the fire that at least 20,000 people who registered for alerts on their phones or computers never received them.

“We found some deficiencies in the system,” he said.

Among the deficiencies, Bills said: the system wasn’t efficient enough, and limited how many phone numbers and addresses could be registered by each person.

“Power also may have been cut off to a specific area because of safety concerns during an evacuation,” he said. “When that happens, you could lose some of your communications.”

By the end of the Black Forest fire the following June, the authority had replaced its annual $30,000 system with an improved $80,000 system.

“Now, people can register up to five locations and eight points of contact on land lines, texts, email and cellphones,” he said. “And it has a nationwide redundancy so that if a local call center fails, another one takes over.”

However, Bills said the 40,000 people who have registered should understand that the new system is limited by the ability of outside technology.

“If we’re making notifications on the same lines as incoming calls from loved ones checking on evacuees and victims, it can slow things down,” he said. “And one carrier had to bring in a temporary cell tower during Waldo to handle the call load.”

Bills said the new system should be able to handle an overload of people registering at the last minute, as was the case during the Waldo Canyon fire.

A monthly charge of 70 cents on phone bills pays for the 911 system.