From severe weather impacts to a missing persons report, Brazos County has a way for people to find out about them instantly and in the palm of your hand.
Their Emergency Notification System is powered by Code Red, a third party service provider used by 911 dispatch centers in cities all over the United States.
Brazos County uses it in several ways for emergency responders like Texas Task Force One.
But Code Red is also available in the palm of your hand through their emergency notification system.
You can get calls, texts or push alerts about emergencies like missing persons or utility outages, but Brazos County says it’s not really being used.
“We don’t have a lot of people registering their cellphones and that’s a critical thing,” said Michelle Mead, the Emergency Management Coordinator for Brazos County.
“That means unless they go in and register their cellphones in the system, we have no way of getting information to them, should there be an emergency in their area.”
Signing up is easy enough though, just visit their website, click register and fill in the prompts.
If you’re looking for even more piece of mind, you can download the app, that according to Brazos County Emergency Communications District Executive Director, Patrick Corley, it "does what the text messages or the phone calls don’t do...the app allows you to go in and actively look at incidents actively going on in your area or any other area in the country that uses code red.”
“Also, if you have GPS enabled on your phone, code red app can keep track of where you're physically located and if that area has code red service, if an event happens in that geographic location, the app will push that notification.”
The county wishes they never have to use code red but, there will be times when an important message needs to be shared.
"Because our population is so transient. We have a real low number of cell phones registered to our system. We just need to keep getting that message out,” said Mead.
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