Will County Emergency Alert System

The Will County Emergency Management Agency and Will County 9-1-1 have recently implemented an improved notification system to provide emergency alerts to people living and working in Will County. This system allows police, fire, and other emergency officials to send messages for a variety of situations that may affect public safety. In addition to receiving text messages on your cell phone, the new system allows you to choose to receive voice messages delivered to your home or work phone, as well as messages sent to your email account.

There are many situations that may require sending emergency alerts, such as chemical accidents, crime alerts, missing persons, and nuclear power station accidents, to name a few. Every situation is unique, and so is the decision by local emergency officials to use this system. It supplements other systems such as outdoor warning sirens and emergency TV and radio messages.

The transition to the new system has already begun. Use of the existing system will end on February 15, 2010. To make this transition, it will be necessary for you to take a few minutes to sign up on the new system. Please visit https://willcounty.smartmsg.com. You will be prompted to create an account and enter the appropriate information for your cell phone and other notification methods.

A word about severe weather notifications: In the past, our existing system has been used to send general severe weather messages. In nearly all cases, these messages are issued by the National Weather Service and then re-transmitted by a local emergency dispatcher who needs to manually create and send the message. This causes significant delays in sending these messages to you. While our new system may still be used to send severe weather messages in certain situations, we will discontinue sending general messages after February 15, 2010 in favor of other systems available at no cost that can send severe weather messages to you automatically. We believe this is ultimately more effective for you. While we cannot endorse any specific systems, you may wish to take advantage of severe weather alerts offered through the following services:

• The Weather Channel – www.weather.com Free weather alerts sent via text message and email for your city or ZIP Code.
• Email Network – www.emergencyemail.org Free alerts sent via text message and email for Will County.
• National Weather Service NOAA Weather Radio - http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lot/?n=nwr Whether or not you receive text alerts, everyone should consider having a NOAA Weather Radio in their home or business. These inexpensive radios receive weather alerts directly from the National Weather Service without relying on text, phone, or email services that may not work in some emergencies.
• There is enough descriptive information about the child, abductor, and/or suspect's vehicle to believe an immediate broadcast alert will help.

Our new notification system and the systems mentioned above are available to you at no cost. However, you may incur charges from your service provider in accordance with your service plan.

We appreciate your interest in being informed when emergencies occur and hope you will take a few minutes to sign up on our new system.

Thank you,

If you have any questions, or would like more information on the Will County Emergency Alert System, please contact our office.