David Slaughter has lived in Oklahoma long enough to know that just because Sequoyah County has avoided severe weather or a tornado for many years, it’s just a matter of time until the world comes crashing down on Sallisaw … or Muldrow … or Roland … or Vian … or any other community in the area.

“I’m not trying to scare anybody, but we all know the weather’s gonna get bad. We’ve been luckier than most, but it’s just a matter of time,” says Slaughter, the county’s 911 coordinator.

And when that time runs out, Slaughter wants Sequoyah County residents to have been afforded the information they need to ride out the storm safely.

“Any type of warning before it hits is better than never getting the warning at all. I don’t want us to be one of those counties when we’re on TV one of these days that you hear, ‘We didn’t hear anything. The sirens didn’t go off. We didn’t get any alerts.’ I don’t want us to be that county,” he says, painting a picture of often-seen news coverage in the wake of massive storms or other catastrophes.

That’s why the county recently launched RAVE, a mass alert early-warning notification system to keep county residents informed of weather threats or other emergencies like a train derailment, chemical spill, I-40 closure or myriad other perils.

“If this works and we don’t have that issue of people facing disaster without being notified, once a tornado hits — and one will hit, it’s just a matter of time — we’re better off, which is what we’re trying to do. We’re all doing the job we do to try and help the people that we live with, that we work with, that we care about. And if we can make it any better, then we need to try and do it. We think this will make it better,” Slaughter says.

Already in use If RAVE sounds familiar, especially to parents of school children, it’s because it’s the alert system required at all Oklahoma schools to ensure the safety of students, teachers and staff.

“RAVE currently has a large footprint in Oklahoma because of the panic button that the education department bought for all the schools. All the schools in Oklahoma are required to have this panic button in use,” Slaughter says. “We are set up with RAVE currently, so that anytime a panic button’s pushed, we automatically get notification back here from any of the schools.”

So with that as a model, Sequoyah County 911 implemented the emergency alert system to provide real-time communications about emer- gencies and other situations that impact the public. From everyday usage to a catastrophic event, residents can receive messages instantly and reliably.

“With the RAVE product, we’re able to do a multitude of things,” he says, pointing to the success Sequoyah County 911 has already had with fire departments across the county. “One of the things we’re able to do is alert an individual fireman, a fire company like Brushy or Sallisaw, or all the firefighters in the county of any messages that we wanna send. And they’d all get that on their cell phone as a text.”

And because it’s a service product going through the RAVE server, the alerts are transmitted at a rate of about 600 per second.

“So in the space of a minute, we could probably alert all of Sequoyah County should we need to do something like that, and they’d all get the same message. I have not had anybody tell me they hadn’t gotten the message yet,” Slaughter says. “Now I know it’s early — we’ve been using it for about a month now — but no one has said, ‘Hey, I didn’t get that text.’ So everything’s going out just exactly like it’s supposed to be going out.”

Covering the county The 911 center currently has a database of 5,368 telephone numbers in the county — which were built into the RAVE app for use by emergency service companies verified by the federal government — that can be notified with the touch of a button. What that means is that in less than nine seconds, almost 5,400 households or individuals can receive an alert of a severe thunderstorm, tornado, icy roads, bomb threat, train crash or any number of other situations that threaten the public.

In addition, RAVE allows 911 to alert those who are passing through the area to potential dangers using geofencing, which combines awareness of a cell phone user’s location with their proximity to locations where the emergency exists.

“One of the functions of this RAVE app that we’ve got is we are able to send messages to individual areas. If we knew that there was a train derailment — similar to what they had in Central a couple of years ago — and it was going to be shut down, we can geo-target that area, so anybody that comes to that area gets a text and says, ‘you can’t cross here’ or ‘there’s a potential for hazardous gas chemicals, stay away.’ We can target that area and send that out,” Slaughter explains.

“We can cover the entire county with a message, whether you’re one of the 5,300 or the opt-ins or when you hit the area. We’re able to target a cell tower area, so anybody that goes into that cell tower area, they will get the message. The towers know where your phones are, so we can target these towers with our messages.”

But what if you’re telephone number isn’t part of that built-in database of 5,368 contacts?

“Another function of the alerting system we’ve got is there’s an opt-in process. Anyone in Sequoyah County can go to the website Smart911, and they can create a username and password. They can put whatever details they want to put in that app,” Slaughter explains, recommending that those who register put themselves in a first responders’ position, providing vital information needed when responding to an emergency. “They can put things like, ‘I have a vicious dog’ — a vicious dog alert is always great — or ‘I have oxygen on scene, so there’s no smoking.’ They can put, ‘I have seizures, if I’m not answering the door, please come on in and check on me.’

Secure information

“This information is not information just anyone can see. It’s a secure website — they’ve got the lock on it and all that. The only way that stuff’s visible is if you call 911 from that number that you’ve registered with us. So if you call from your cell phone or your home phone you’ve registered with a Smart911 app and you put down all this private information, the only time anyone will ever see it is when that number calls 911. No one will see the information except the 911 operators. If we have that additional information and there’s some reason you can’t talk — you could be choking, you could be trapped underneath rubble from a tornado and maybe it’s hard for you to talk, there’s a million things — but that information would still get to us what we need to look for. ‘I have three people in my house’ could be information you provided. OK, so if we go out to that scene, we pull you out, and we know from your information there should be two more people in here, where are the other two people? So that’s important.”

While registering through the Smart911 website is recommended, those who have questions or who encounter problems can call Sequoyah County 911’s non-emergency telephone number — 918-790-2528. Additionally, those who are already part of the RAVE database or who opt-in to receive the alerts, Slaughter says they can also optout, which is similar to the National Do Not Call Registry.

But what if you don’t live in Sequoyah County?

“You can still opt-in. Fort Smith, for example, has Smart911 already in their stuff, so if you go to Fort Smith, and for some reason you have to call 911, the information you register with us is going to pop up over there,” Slaughter says. ‘The 911 dispatchers there will see that you are subject to seizures or that you’re epileptic or that you’re diabetic — knowing you’re not drunk, you’re having a diabetic seizure. So anyone with the Smart911 platform — just when you dial 911 — will be able to see your information.”

Weather alerts

An important feature Smart911 offers is National Weather Service alerts in real-time.

“If a tornado warning happens and the National Weather Service issues that alert, there’s no delay. In a tornado, the biggest fear everyone has is ‘I won’t know.’ All the horror stories you see on the news is ‘We got no warning, we got no warning.’ You’ll get the warning immediately when the National Weather Service sends it out, and that’s through the wireless emergency alert that the federal government has,” Slaughter says, comparing it to the recorded warnings heard on a car radio which alerts with a squelch tone followed by a weather advisory. “Those are what you’re gonna get automatically on your phone. It doesn’t matter where you’re at.

“Nobody in Sequoyah County, unless there’s some catastrophic failure with the infrastructure, nobody in Sequoyah County ought to be at the point where they say, ‘I didn’t get notified’ if they opt-in.”

Slaughter recalls the June 17 wind storm that blew through Sequoyah County overnight with winds reported at near 100 mph in Tulsa.

“It would have been nice to know that was coming,” Slaughter says. “Could you prepare for anything like that? No, there’s no preparation for that. But if you woke up at 2 a.m. like I did wondering, ‘What the heck is all that?’ Knowing that that’s that storm coming through, it’s hitting now, I think that helps. I think being a little bit more assured of what’s going on at the time, it’s not Chinese bombing us, it’s actually a storm. It’s just the fear of the unknown.”

Slaughter says, “We got lucky it was just wind the other night. The next storm that comes in could very well be a tornado. Tornadoes aren’t lightening up, they’re getting worse and worse and worse.”

Making it easy

And Slaughter understands the challenges some Sequoyah County residents face when they are concerned about the weather.

“We’ve got a lot of elderly that maybe don’t know how to use a computer to check the weather, not sure how to use their phone to check the weather. But getting a text is easier to understand. And should they choose to register their landline, they’ll get an automated phone call. You can also get the alert by email, you chose how you want to receive your information.

“I think it’ll really help a lot of our older population, which I’m a member of. It will kind of ease some fears, know what’s going on,” he says.

“A lot of the stuff, there’s very little warning. But even if you got the alert a minute early, at least you know when it gets black, all the shaking and rattling’s going on, ‘OK, that’s the tornado’,” Slaughter says. “Yeah, you’re gonna be scared, but I think a little bit of calm knowing that’s just a tornado, it’s not anything I don’t know what it is. It’s gonna be somewhat better than just not knowing what the heck’s going on. Which way is it going? Is it going toward my children’s house. Is it going that way or is it going away from them? Maybe it’s one less worry in the middle of all that stuff.

“Fifty-three hundred people are going to get the text from the National Weather Service in bad weather. Fifty-three hundred people are going to get any message that I create and send out to them now. But anybody other than those 5,300, everybody in Sequoyah County needs to go to that Smart911 website or they need to call me and we’ll get you hooked up.”

But Slaughter is realistic. He knows there will be those who dismiss the notion of being alerted to severe weather or a disaster.

“You’re gonna have a group of people that say, ‘I can handle it, I don’t need RAVE. I’m not scared. Storms don’t scare me.’ There’s a large, overconfident group that just don’t think they need it. Until that tornado hits. When that tornado hits, you’ll have those same people that say ‘I wish I had more notice. I wish someone would have told me. I didn’t know it was coming.’ It’ll happen every single time.”