Do You Have Emergency Alert Confusion?
The December 5 earthquake in Northern California and resulting quake and tsunami warnings, combined with a recent change in COBI’s Nixle alert procedures, have raised some questions from local residents about alerts. Hopefully this explainer will provide some clarity.
Types of Alerts
There are two types of alerts: manually triggered and auto triggered. As the names suggest, manually triggered alerts require a human to be aware of a danger or important information and send out a message via an alert system; auto-triggered alerts are sent out by a machine when a system detects a threat such as increased seismographic activity.
As you might imagine, manually triggered alerts are not especially effective in situations that have essentially no lag time between the detection of a danger and the danger itself. The best example is an earthquake.
On the other hand, manually triggered alerts are more effective in providing specific, detailed information when there is time for a human to quickly compose and send out a message.
What this means is that you want to have both types of alerts to cover all types of situations.
The Alerts You Need
On Bainbridge Island, you want to have access to three alerts:
Sign up for manually triggered Nixle alerts from the City of Bainbridge Island. Text 98110 to 888777. You can also receive Nixle alerts via email: Send a text message with the word "email" to 888777 to first verify if an email is registered to your phone number. After receiving a response, reply with an email address.
Download the MyShake app to your phone. MyShake relies on ShakeAlert, which is an auto-triggered earthquake early warning system developed by the U.S. Geological Survey to issue alerts for the West Coast. Click here to get MyShake. If an earthquake is detected that may affect your location, your phone will immediately tell you, “Earthquake Detected! Drop, Cover, Hold On. Protect Yourself.”
WA Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) are manually triggered alerts that are intended to go to the phones of everyone in Washington State. However, you need to make sure these emergency alerts are turned on on your device. Follow these instructions to make sure. WEAs include tsunami, earthquake, AMBER, flooding, tornadoes, and national security warnings.
Extra Alerts
You can also sign up for Kitsap Alert Emergency Notifications. These cover other immediate emergencies, including active shooter, wildfire, hazardous materials, missing persons, and weather events like tornados and extreme heat. Sign up for these here.
You might also want to sign up for additional emergency notifications from agencies that serve Bainbridge Island. See the list here.
