REGIONAL- With the 20-acre fire at Lucky Boy ponds fresh in everyone’s mind, Ely Police Officer Bradley Roy spoke to the Ely City Council on June 6 about the area’s pair of regional emergency alert notification systems, known as Northland Alert.
Northland Alert is a free, automated alert system, hosted by a partnership of St. Louis County and the cities of Duluth, Hermantown, Hibbing, and Virginia. The alerts are sent out in a variety of emergency situations, such as severe weather, unexpected road closures, missing persons, and evacuations of buildings and neighborhoods in case of flood, fire, or other disasters.
“Anyone can sign up for the Northland Alert system,” Roy explained. “It only takes a few minutes, and you can choose what sorts of alerts you want to receive.” A user can subscribe to the service online on a PC. A user can also access the service through the Everbridge app on a smart device.
The Timberjay explored the different routes to sign up for the service. Overall, the easiest way to access it is through northlandalert.com. The sign-up process was more complicated and confusing using the Everbridge app.
Signing-up through the northlandalert.com URL will forward the user to a webpage hosted by the city of Duluth. Despite being hosted on the Duluth municipal website, using the subscribe button on this webpage will take you to the sign-up forms for the entire county and the partner cities.
The subscription process sends you to three forms: one for your identity, so the system knows where you are located for regional alerts; one for your email, text and phone contact information, and how you want your alerts delivered; and one for which alerts you wish to receive. The last form also allows you to set a quiet time of your own choosing for those who want alerts muted during sleeping hours. All the information on the site is confidential and not shared outside of public safety agencies sending alerts. Once a user sets up an account, it is easy to sign back in to change alert choices or delete an account. Because this is a public service of the county and partner cities, the system does not ask for any payment or financial information.
For the Timberjay’s trial subscription sign-up, we chose to receive alerts from the Ely Police Department, Ely public works and utilities, the Ely Library, the Ely Fire Department, Ely Community Events, and St. Louis County emergency notifications. Since the choice of alerts is up to the user, someone who lives outside one of the partner cities could go ahead and just choose emergency alerts from the county.
Northland Alert also has severe weather alerts and these were not optional when signing-up. The program automatically includes weather alerts, regardless of whether a user wants to receive them. For those who have a severe weather alert app on a smart phone or an emergency radio that delivers National Weather Service severe weather alerts, the Northland Alert system will be redundant for weather alerts.
The subscription process took only a few minutes online at northlandalert.com. “The virtue of the Northland Alert system is that we reach out to a large number of residents very quickly,” Ely Police Chief Chad Houde told the Timberjay. “For example, with the high fire danger, if we had a large fire approach Ely and wanted to evacuate a neighborhood—heaven forbid anything like that ever happens—we could alert everyone in the city with a subscription to Northland Alert, which is a lot more effective and efficient than going from door-to-door.”