“It’s all about making sure that we have the right system in place to reach people when we need to reach people quickly with accurate information about how they can protect themselves and their families,” explains Monroe County Executive Adam Bello.
The alerts will be localized based on the emergency. They may go out county-wide, targeted to specific zip codes, a portion of town or even just a few streets. “It can be very confusing right, if you have a water main that only effects a certain neighborhood… what happens is you kind of have to get it out to everybody but now we’ll be able to really target folks in specific neighborhoods where it might only be a street or two streets, this system will really allow us to be able to do that,” says Rochester Mayor Malik Evans.
If you’re one of the 40,000 people in Monroe County already signed up for the hyper-reach alerts, MonroeAlert replaces that and you will need to re-sign up for the service. MonroeAlert is an upgraded system that costs the county roughly $100,000 per year…