When an emergency situation happens, you want to be safe as soon as possible. The emergency alert system, Code Red is proving to be a beneficial tool in Ada County.
You have to sign up, in order for the alerts to come straight to your phone. Code Red is the system Ada County uses to send out emergency notifications to people in the community. It allows them to send phone calls, text messages, and emails to people who have opted in to the system.
Ada County still calls land lines in emergency situations, but they realize a lot of people don't have land lines anymore.The system lets people associate their number with different addresses. This allows them to be alerted if there is something going on near their home, workplace, school, or a care facility for example.
Right now, they are using it mostly for law enforcement related incidents and wildfires where they need to get specific information to a certain area. Most recently, they used it to alert a neighborhood as officers searched for a man they say opened fire and led them on a chase.
"Just a couple of you know, weeks ago, we used it during the Kuna incident where we had a neighborhood, we had a SWAT team in the neighborhood and we needed to let neighbors know that we wanted them to stay inside and stay safe, so we use it in those situations," said Andrea Dearden, Ada County Sheriff's Office.
Code Red is used by agencies across the country, but Ada County started using Code Red about a year and a half ago.
If you are traveling, code red will automatically update your location and send you alerts specific to the area you're in.
You can sign up by heading to the Ada County Sheriff's website here, https://adasheriff.org/ and you can download the app on your phone. At any point, you can make changes to your account such as an address and you can opt out of the system completely.
