The emergency notification system employed by the city of Columbus, the Ohio State University and the Franklin County Commissioners debuted on Tuesday, October 4, 2005 and proved to be very successful in the opinion of Art Baker, Emergency Manager for Warning of the Franklin County Emergency Management and Homeland Security. “We were more than pleased with the results of this exercise. We called over 37,000 residences and businesses in the Franklin County area and reached over 80% with our message. The remaining 20% were either busy signals or no one answered. If the system reached an answering machine a message was left. All in all, it performed exactly as expected.”

The Exercise
The goal of the exercise was to test, under field conditions, Franklin County’s Emergency Notification System using Twenty First Century Communications’ Universal Communications System (UCS). The test objective was to rapidly call approximately 40,000 Franklin County (Ohio) telephone numbers; representing a population of roughly 140,000 individuals. The call process would be initiated at one time by use of the UCS geocoded mapping tool. The exercise served to enable the Franklin County EMA to test the system and to educate the public as to its availability.

Exercise Participants

• The Franklin County Emergency Management Agency – the primary message initiator and co-purchaser of the UCS system.
• The Ohio State University – a notification initiator and co-purchaser of the UCS system.
• SBC Communications – the local exchange carrier serving Franklin County.
• Twenty First Century Communications (TFCC) – the developer of the UCS and provider of the notification system infrastructure.

Exercise Procedure
The Emergency Manager for Warning of the Franklin County EMA, Art Baker, initiated the outdial message, using the UCS geocoded mapping system to designate 18 target areas inside Franklin County to be notified. This was accomplished by drawing a variety of polygons on a web-based map using the UCS mapping tool. Having the mapping tool to identify addresses within the target areas, the UCS then extracted the contact phones numbers to be dialed.

At the time of the test, Ohio did not permit the 911 telephone database to be made available to the county emergency management agencies. A public 411 database was used to generate the contact phone numbers. The database used in this exercise was updated every 24 hours by both the Franklin County EMA and TFCC. However, unlisted and non-published numbers are not included in 411 databases.  Therefore these numbers were omitted from the test.

The message to be delivered was then recorded by the EMA: “This is a test of the Franklin County Emergency Notification System.  This is only a test.”

The outdial process was initiated shortly after 2:00 PM, and completed approximately 15 minutes later. As calls were complete, the call results were displayed as numbers in a pie chart and on the UCS mapping tool. Although UCS permits the client to set the number of call attempts, only one call attempt was made to each telephone number.
The test was successful in that all systems performed as expected. 37,118 actual calls were accomplished. The difference from the 40,000 call figures resulted from populations estimates being used for the designated contact areas.

“Now, we’re ready to move into the next phase of our plan,” stated Baker. Phase Two involves the establishment of a page on the Franklin County Emergency Management and Homeland Security web site ( www.emafc.com) that will allow residents who only have cell phones or unlisted numbers to sign up for emergency calls. “This is important because so many people have unlisted home phone numbers or use their cell phones for personal home use instead of the more traditional land-line phone service. In these cases, we have no way of reaching these people unless they register their phone numbers with us. That’s why we’ve created this secure registration web site,” Baker said.

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