The City of La Porte, Texas

Emergency Notification Coverage: The World's Largest Concentration of Chemical Plants

Overview

Location: Harris County, TX
Population: 34,469
City Size: 20 sq. miles

The City of La Porte, which has the largest concentration of chemical plants in the world, was looking for a solution to its emergency notification challenges. The city needed a solution that allowed them to easily alert schools and other public buildings in the event of a threat, such as one involving hazardous waste. The city’s existing public address systems proved both slow and unreliable, so the notification solution would need to provide quick and easy alerting in the event of an emergency.

Jeff Suggs, Emergency Management Coordinator for the City of La Porte, Texas, discusses the city’s unique challenge and solution.

Challenge

Before Alertus, we had another system for emergency notification, which used a VHF radio signal to contact our schools and public buildings. The dispatcher would have to speak over a microphone and tell people about the situation. The problem was someone had to be in the room to hear it. If the speaker was turned down or the battery was dead, we always had to follow up with a phone call, which just took too long.

“The Alert Beacon® cuts down a lot of the front-end time of getting information to people so they can react. Alertus is a great tool in that it’s very speedy in its message delivery.”

Solution

I started looking at other systems and ran across Alertus at a conference. I liked the idea of a device that flashed instead of relying on someone speaking into a microphone.

All our school buildings have Alert Beacons installed, as well as our libraries, city hall, recreation centers, senior centers, and any public building. The intent and the idea for the future is to branch out the Alertus System further into the community.

Handling Hazardous Materials Risk

La Porte has the largest concentration of chemical plants in the world. With 48 chemical facilities and two ports, thousands of miles of plants and pipelines, and hundreds of trucks going through every day, there’s a definite risk of a hazardous material incident.

We’ve partnered with some of our chemical plants, and we now have Alert Beacons in those facilities; that way, those locations have that same information.

Alertus lets us communicate as fast as possible to the general public, especially our schools, to get them to shelter in place during those incidents. In that respect, we’re starting to work with Alertus on private entities in the city and public facilities to have a city-wide notification system.

Third-Party Notification System Integration

In the future, will we use more scrolling signs and integrate more into the system? Absolutely. Alertus is willing to work with almost any third-party notification company to strengthen your system. We have another notification system called Blackboard Connect and Alertus integrated with that company so that we can activate them simultaneously.

Alertus will reach out to whomever; they’re willing to work with anyone to increase the number of notification tools in your toolbox.

Conclusion

We want to go ahead and continue to build relationships with private companies to increase our coverage area. We also want to make sure that our neighbors get involved. I know that after we got the Alertus System, one of our neighboring cities, Pasadena, has now installed 100 Alert Beacons, and another neighbor, Deer Park, is also looking at getting the Alertus System. I think that other people are taking notice because we’re moving forward with Alertus here and others get a chance to see what Alertus can do.

Ultimately, we’d like to see others adopting Alertus on a large scale so that the Alertus System becomes recognizable, something that everyone knows about. Whether someone walks into a school building here, a neighboring city hall, or a fire station in another county, they’ll see that Alert Beacon and feel protected.