Everyone with an email account and/or a cell phone should register for an account with nixle.com to receive community alerts. Nixle is a community outreach and emergency notification platform that has partnered with over 8,000 public safety agencies so far.
Nixle’s service is free for all residents of the United States. Of course, your carrier might charge for text messages, depending on the data plan you signed up for with Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, and so forth. Nixle does NOT share your information and you can choose the kind of alerts you want to get. Just a few examples might be police, fire department, sheriff, community schools, the National Center for Exploited and Missing Children, FEMA (IPAWS), and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). They also partner with Google Public Alerts.
After you register with your first location, you can add others (including other counties and states) where close friends and family members live. You’ll need to enter a real address for those, too. And you can choose whether you want text messages or emails or both.
Even if it’s not an obvious emergency as such for you, you’ll know which parts of town to avoid until police activity is finished or a bad traffic accident is cleared. Sometimes a local police division can seem a little too overworked to get alerts out rightaway. (They also need to have an officer on duty who is trained and authorized to send out the alerts.) Most of the time I get needed text messages and emails frequently during the day.
We live in a drought-stricken state that is almost always on alert or high alert for wildfires. When danger is high, evacuations may be ordered and wouldn’t we want all the advance warning we can get?
It would be easy for all of us to stick our heads in the sands and deny the existence of our dangerous times but we all truly need to know what’s going on around us. So sign up with nixle.com right now. Seriously. It might be a lifesaver for you or your family.