Alert Ready Now Live for Broadcasters

Alert Ready is now live for many broadcasters, including Golden West Radio, to help alert the public of emergencies.

It is a national messaging system operated by Pelmorex Media, the parent company of The Weather Network, and developed in partnership with federal, provincial and territorial emergency management officials, Environment Canada and the broadcast industry.

"You're not going to have a warning interrupting your hockey game, but if Environment Canada issues a tornado warning or if there was some kind of industrial fire, wildfires, floods, those kinds of things where the community is put at risk, those are the types of warnings you would see," explained Paul Temple, Senior Vice President of Regulatory Affairs with Pelmorex Media. "Typically in the case of radio, you'll either hear a recorded message or in some cases it may be generated by a text to speech software program, and then they will hear that message."

The Town of Eastend recently used Alert Ready to issue a precautionary boil water advisory, and Chief Administrative Officer with the Town, Edna Laturnus, says it was overall very effective and is something they would use again in the future.

"The third west portion of the province was selected as a pilot project," she said. "We issued the alert for a precautionary drinking water advisory. It went over to the Weather Network, and of course that also effects the radio stations, so our alert was aired. We had a lot of feedback into our office that it was good and we found it very useful and I think our residents found it useful as well."

The system is locally oriented, so alerts would only be distributed to these stations if there is a disaster in the area.

"You do have to attend meetings for training in order to be designated in your jurisdiction to be able to issue the advisories," added Laturnus. "It was a bit of training and then there was a refresher course because when they first started it was about a year until it was actually implemented in our province. The first one in Maple Creek that I attended there were probably about 30 of us, and then with the refresher course in Swift Current it was about the same."

In May of 2014 there was a large grass fire that threatened buildings and the lives of residents, and the Swift Current Fire Department believes Alert Ready would allow them to effectively control the situation when it comes to onlookers.

"What we found was the problem there is the public all came to see what was going on, and what we would probably be announcing is stay away," said Fire Chief and Director of Emergency Planning, Denis Pilon. "There's a health issue with breathing the smoke and people should stay at home and stay indoors, so that's the type of thing that we would use it for. Typically, the alert could be generated by us at the Fire Hall, as we do have four members of our city employees that are trained and certified to send out alert messages."

"Historically, we have had no means of informing our citizens if there was a problem. In fact, CRTC has been very tight on the rules to protect people from spam and so on, and we understand that," added Pilon. "It's nice that emergency services are now able to give those warnings out. You look down in the United States and they're on there all the time about a tornado, severe weather, those types of things, so now we'll have the ability to give live information that is up to date based on people on the ground."

To raise awareness of Alert Ready, a $2 million national integrated marketing campaign began on April 6, 2015 that includes public service announcements across radio and television, digital advertisements and a new website, AlertReady.ca.