RISON - More than 100 resi‐dents of Cleveland County have so far taken advantage of a free alert system that notifies people of emergencies, weather alerts and even community events through text messages, emails, voice calls and other means.
Brooklyn McClellan, coordi‐nator for the Cleveland County Office of Emergency Manage‐ment (OEM), said the county has contracted with Rave Mass Notification Systems to provide the service. The new notification system started about three weeks ago. “It’s very useful, es‐pecially for the entire county,” she said.
Cleveland County is using federal COVID relief money to pay for the service. McClellan said it costs $4,400 per year to operate.
The service is free to everyone who signs up for it, and those us‐ing it can select which type of notifications they would like to receive and how they would like to receive them.
One other feature of the pro‐gram is that it allows the OEM to select specific areas within the county to send to specific alerts or messages that may be appli‐cable only to that area. For in‐stance, McClellan said if a per‐son was to go missing within the Woodlawn area, OEM could draw a polygon around that area, and notifications would only be sent to those signed up for the service who are within the des‐ignated area.
McClellan said residents can receive four types of messages through the service. She said people can select any one or all of the notifications:
• Severe and non-severe weather events - She said these alerts are issued through the National Weather Service. Severe notifications are for things like tornado or severe weather warn‐ings. Non-severe warnings can be for things like freeze warn‐ings or heat advisories.
• Emergency alerts - McClel‐lan said these notifications can activated on the local level, and can be for public emergencies, missing persons, hazardous ma‐terial acciden...
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