Sedgwick County rolls out public alert system for emergencies, starting in these cities

Sedgwick County government has rolled out a voluntary public alert system — Civic Ready — that can send text messages, e-mails or voice alerts of emergencies or important news.

City governments in Wichita and Mount Hope are also able to send out more targeted and localized alerts through the system. Other cities in Sedgwick County are expected to join the program later this year.

To use it, residents have to sign up and select how they want to be notified — and what kind of alerts they would like to receive.

Local governments in the Wichita area have come under scrutiny for failing to swiftly notify residents during two boil-water advisories in 2021 and 2022 and ahead of an EF-3 tornado that struck southeast Sedgwick County last spring.

Jon Marr, Sedgwick County’s deputy director of emergency management, called it “a new layer in our warning strategy.”

“There’s been an appetite for this type of service in recent years,” Marr said.

Sedgwick County Emergency Management has opted not to use FEMA’s Wireless Emergency Alerts system — which buzzes cell phones and sends text message emergency alert to every cell phone within a targeted geographical area within seconds — when a boil-water advisory is issued.

Cody Charvat, operations officer for Sedgwick County Emergency Management, said the county is familiar with the Civic Ready system.

“We’ve had Civic Ready in-house for six or seven years, something like that,” he said. “We’ve used it for internal notifications. And . . . when 911 began looking for something to expand or rather to implement reverse-911, we realized we already had a tool that would allow us to do that, we just had to expand how we were using it.”

On Civic Ready, residents can sign up for community bulletins, public safety and public health alerts, and road closures, specifying whether they want to get them via e-mail or phone. The service is free to the public, and residents may later unsubscribe from the service.

“It is important that they enter a location, as well, because sometimes the sender of the message will not send it to the entire city list,” Charvat said. “They may want to send it to just a specific neighborhood in the city of Wichita as a very localized alert.”

Charvat said Civic Ready can send text-based alerts in 69 written languages and voice alerts in 31 spoken languages.

“One of the things that we’re really excited about here is the language preferences,” Charvat said.