Aurora’s department for public safety communications is making some changes after problems in its system caused dispatchers to send emergency notifications to the wrong residences during a string of home invasions earlier this month.
Three women who live in the Shores subdivision in southwest Aurora . After police began canvassing the neighborhood for a suspect, the city’s emergency communication system notified people who don’t live near the Shores about the incident and also initially skipped a few people who do live there.
“There was a human error in the system when we went to send that notification out,” said Diane Culverhouse, manager of the public safety communications department in Aurora. “Some people got the call that didn’t need to get it … so (dispatchers) stopped it, they tried to restart it, and then they sent the all-clear message out to some people who didn’t get the original message.”
Culverhouse said she is in the process of establishing monthly training sessions for all of the 62 dispatchers to work with the mass notification system, which was upgraded in March.
Another error that night had to do with the new system’s text-to-speech option. Because of a system glitch, a voice message about the home invasions came out unintelligible to the Aurora residents who had opted in to notifications delivered through text-to-speech.
“We are going to make sure that when we do those calls, we actually call and record a message ourselves as opposed to doing text-to-speech,” Culverhouse said.
Aurora has since simplified the process for residents to register their cell phones or current addresses.
By clicking a logo that says “citizen alert notification setup” on the right side of the page, residents can create an account that asks for their address, phone number and how they want to be notified in case of emergencies.
Dean Semelbauer, a Neighborhood Watch area coordinator for 22 suburban communities in southeast Aurora, said part of the problem is that Aurora residents are not registered for the emergency notification system properly, or at all.
“A lot of people disconnected their landline and moved to cell phones,” Semelbauer said. “The city can’t keep track of who lives at what address through their cell phone, so they need to register that phone. A common problem is that people either don’t know that they have to do it, or they don’t know how.”
Liz Rehwalt, an information technology specialist for Aurora’s public safety department, said in all of Aurora, there are 2,670 subscribers to the alert notifications. There are more than 300,000 residents in the city.
“Aurora citizens need to opt in for emergency notifications because we cannot contact them if they don’t,” Rehwalt said. “We get the landline telephone numbers from CenturyLink for residents and businesses inside Aurora. If you do not have a (landline) phone, you have to opt in to be contacted.”
Megan Mitchell: 303-954-2650, mmitchell@denverpost.com or twitter.com/MMitchelldp
