Power outages, floods, fires, and even criminal activity can affect neighborhoods across San Luis Obispo County. But many of the alerts about those emergencies won’t reach residents’ phones unless they sign up ahead of time.
“Everyone should sign up for AlertSLO,” said Joe Little, City of San Luis Obispo Emergency Manager.
Cell phone carriers track users’ locations, and some larger emergencies trigger messages through the federal Wireless Emergency Alerts system. Those alerts reach phones automatically, but residents will not receive Reverse 911 calls or the more detailed information AlertSLO provides unless they opt in.
“We can put more information in AlertSLO. It is easier for us to deploy it. We have physically more characters in it, and we can include links to things like a website,” Little said.
Subscribers can choose to get a text message or a phone call. If they don’t answer the call, they get a voicemail. That’s what happened last week, when a message was sent to people in San Luis Obispo about a natural gas leak downtown.
“The San Luis Obispo Police Department has issued an evacuation order due to a natural gas leak for the area of Higuera Street between Chorro and Broad,” the message said.
Little said the long-term goal is to merge Reverse 911, which the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office manages, into the AlertSLO system. Because that could be years away, officials recommend residents sign up for both systems now, by simply going to ReadySLO.org.
Some residents said they weren’t sure which system they were signed up for, or whether they were signed up at all.
“I don’t know the difference,” said Alan Staley of Atascadero. “I know during COVID, during the pandemic, we lived in SLO, and so we signed up for, I think it was the Reverse 911 or maybe just the AlertSLO, either one of those.”
Katie Hollingsworth of San Luis Obispo said the recent gas leak prompted her to check.
“I thought I was already signed up. I didn’t realize they were separate,” she said.
Another local resident said he thought he might be signed up through a college course he takes, but added, “I don’t think I am.”
Only about 12,000 of the county’s roughly 280,000 residents are signed up for AlertSLO.
KSBY News Reporter Jessica Roe went through both sign-up processes and found each took just a few minutes. Reverse 911 asks for a bit more information, such as how many people live in the household and how many bedrooms are in the home.
“It helps us understand, you know, for evacuation purposes, things like that, or how many folks are affected by a certain incident, so that information is really critical for us to know,” Little said.
Alerts are tied to where a person lives, down to the part of town. Officials say residents who move, even within the same city, should update their profiles so they keep getting the right alerts.
If you have a story idea you would like to send to KSBY News Reporter Jessica Roe, you can reach her directly via email at jessica.roe@ksby.com.
