Alerts When You Move to a New Home
Now that we are getting settled into our new home, I’ve continued to make progress with safety precautions and alerts. As with many other areas, we have an emergency alert option we can sign up for.
Once we are signed up, where ever we live, we will get alerts about emergencies and other important community news including severe weather, unexpected road closures, missing persons, necessary evacuation, and more.
I think that is grand, don’t you? Especially in this day and age of so many crises, weather emergencies, and more! If you want to see if your area offers it, you can try typing in your county and state AND emergency alerts. If nothing turns up, I would call your local county offices or police or fire department. Hopefully they can fill you in on what is available in your neck of the woods.
I really appreciated that they give you plenty of flexibility on how you are contacted depending on the type of alert and that you can choose more than one place, i.e. grandkids’ schools, where you work, your home, etc. Plus, if you have an elderly parent or other relative with special needs at home, you can put a notification for that as well so they can be aware of it in an emergency.
iPhone Alerts
Also, for those who haven’t yet discovered this, if you have an iPhone, you have towo special alerts built in. One goes off if there is an Amber alert in your area. The other is for federal government designated emergencies. These alerts are incredibly loud. You can’t turn off the federal alert (which I personally am quite happy to have). You can, however, turn off the Amber alert and if you spend quite a bit of time in a quiet area where a loud alarm might be an issues, you might want to think about whether you want to keep that or not. Here’s an informative video about this topic!
All in all, I do appreciate this, though I would vote for the option to turn the sound down at least a bit. I am leaving the Amber alert off since I can get the info quite easily online. But the emergency alerts are staying on. After all, if a tornado does come chasing me, or Zombies really do attack, I would like some notification! Between the County, alerts and Apple’s iPhone, I should be in pretty good shape. How about you?
Grandma Kc says
Great information — thank you! I had not idea such a thing existed and I did as you suggested and our County does offer it! And while there is still no way to get notified of earthquakes I am going to check it out! Thanks!
Lisa @ Grandma's Briefs says
I’m glad to hear your thoughts on the iOS 7 update. I’ve held off, my husband didn’t. He keeps telling me to update but I’ve heard more bad things than good, so I think I’ll continue holding off.
The updates are a good idea, though, in most cases. I know reverse 911 calls were a huge help (and a failure for some here) when the wildfires devastated our state. Not so sure it worked out as well with all the flooding.
Thanks for sharing!
Kaye Swain says
Hi Lisa, I like that it shows each message time, but the “spotlight” (where you used to slide to the left to search the phone) is now at the top and gets in the way of those other top messages. And some things seem to work a little more trickily. If I could, I would have waited at least another month or two. And I heard those alarms may actually be available for the ios6.x so you may have those already? I never noticed them until that amber alert came through so I have no clue WHEN they actually showed up 🙂 – When you do update, let me know what you think 🙂 🙂 🙂
Kaye Swain says
Good job, Kc! 🙂 I’m so glad you have it too. Hopefully, we never need them but if we do, we’ll sure be grateful! 🙂
Carol Covin says
I was driving from Virginia to Georgia recently and saw a Silver Alert posted on one of the overhead signs. When I looked it up on my iPhone, it told about an elderly man with Alzheimer’s who had wandered away from his home and to be on the alert for him. What a great service!
Kaye Swain says
That’s AWESOME Carol. Not all states do that, yet, but I’m hoping with time they all will. Just as important as Amber alerts! Thanks for the info 🙂