About 1,000 more accounts have subscribed to community alerts in Sarnia-Lambton since last May.
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About 1,000 more accounts have subscribed to community alerts in Sarnia-Lambton since last May.
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“So it seems we’ve got some interest,” general manager Vince Gagner said.
It was then that Community Awareness Emergency Response (CAER), the Sarnia-Lambton Environmental Association (SLEA) and the Industrial Education Cooperative (IEC) – Gagner is general manager for all three – launched the Bluewater Association for Safety, Environment and Sustainability (BASES ).
The move was to increase the amount of information members of the public received about things like flaring and spills at area petrochemical plants, as well as road closures and other health and safety information via CAER’s My Community Notification Network (MyCNN) system.
That “was in response to feedback from our member companies and our community … to look for a way to improve engagement,” Gagner said.
Companies like Nova Chemicals, Imperial Oil and CF Industries have signed on one by one to post non-emergency information in the months since, he said.
Nine companies are listed on the network via lambtonbases.ca as currently providing those updates, with another 13 “coming soon.”
There have been 107 community awareness notifications since May 4 when the system launched, said BASES communications spokesperson Shaun Bisson.
Currently there are more than 14,000 MyCNN subscriptions, Gagner said.
“The uptake has been significant,” he said.
There’s been no change in how municipalities and emergency responders are notified about emergencies, Gagner said, noting that number anyway is “very low.”
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Hopes are the work being done to improve transparency is noted, he said.
“And stay tuned,” he said. “There’s more to come.”
BASES also announced earlier this month a new hotline for people to call in for information.
The 226-778-4611 line replaces one where companies previously had to call in and record messages.
The new version employs text-to-speech technology, so the MyCNN and hotline updates happen in tandem, Gagner said.
“You could imagine that in the event of an emergency, when you need to communicate information out, time is critical,” he said. “So anything you can do to streamline that process, where you’re not making several phone calls to several audiences.”
Few people used the former hotline, he said.
Asked why make the change now, he said BASES wanted to go incrementally instead of all at once.
“You can imagine, there’s change management required at each site to update their processes and their systems to come on board with the new technology, so we did them one at a time,” he said.
Details about notifications remain on the hotline for 48 hours, Bisson said, noting if they’re updated, the timer is restarted.
Hopes are every Lambton resident subscribes to MyCNN, as well as the families of workers in the area from out of town, Gagner said.
“So if there is ever anything that happens at one of our sites, they’ll get that notification right away and they’ll know that their loved one is safe.”
-with files from Paul Morden