With flooding season well underway and wildfire season coming up, local government officials are hoping more people sign up for the new emergency alert system.

If you are not signed up you won鈥檛 get any alerts. The Voyent Alert system is customizable and they only send the evacuation alerts to the people who are directly affected by the alert, meaning it doesn鈥檛 go to the whole community.

The way it works is that you use a pin drop and you can have up to three different addresses that you can be notified for on Voyent. You can choose to not get all the notifications, you can choose to only get emergency notifications, if that is what you want. So if you don鈥檛 want to get the recycling depot information, you can log into your account and you can deactivate that and only get emergency alerts.

Nellie Davis, manager of regional economic development at Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako explained that the Bulkley-Nechako Public Alerts system has two categories - Emergency Alerts and Public Alerts, each with their own notification sound.

鈥淓mergency alerts are used any time an event precipitates a hazard notice, evacuation alert or evacuation order. These alerts are sent to anyone registered with the system at an address inside the specific area deemed to be impacted by the event (these areas are included in a map when the alert goes out) - these alerts do not get sent to the general public, only residents registered to receive information for an address inside the Evacuation Alert area would be notified,鈥� she wrote in an email to Black Press.

Public alerts are sent to anyone in the area registered for public alerts to let them know about impacts to the regular RDBN operations, such as Transfer Station hour changes.

Anyone wishing to sign up can do so on the RDBN鈥檚 website.

There will also be RDBN officials ready to help sign up residents at local farmers鈥� markets this summer.

marisca.bakker@interior-news.com
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