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PROFESSIONAL EMERGENCY MANAGEMENT
FirstCall is the only emergency notification company that has an IAEM Certified Emergency Manager (CEM). Mr. C. J. "Red" Delatte has been in the emergency management field for over 20 years. Red is ready to work with you to set up your community notification program.
DEDICATED DIGITAL CIRCUITS
Speed is of the essence in emergencies. That is why our system is connected to over 1,400 digital telephone lines, all of which are dedicated for the sole use of the FirstCall Network. That means that over 1,400 calls can go out at a time.
SYSTEM REDUNDANCY
FirstCall is committed to having our system never be down, regardless of the situation. We have a generator which provides full backup in our Louisiana office. FirstCall maintains a secondary site with complete redundancy in Nevada. All data is updated and backed up at both sites on a daily basis. As a FirstCall client, you will be provided our main emergency number as well as two secondary emergency numbers. Should a disaster take down our hard phone lines, an emergency cellular number is also available to you. If this number is unavailable, then a private emergency number at our redundant site in Nevada immediately becomes operative and is available for any activation you require. FirstCall has a service agreement with our telephone line supplier that puts us on top of the priority list for service restoration. Our telephone line supplier has multiple sources available for long distance and if one carrier is down, they can seamlessly switch to another.
TRAINING
FirstCall encourages our customers to test and has a separate lower fee for testing. Testing makes your authorized users comfortable with the system and when an emergency does happen your personnel will carry out their jobs in a most efficient manner. We at FirstCall encourage "role playing" and our techs are available to help your users become familiar with the system from 7:00am until 7:00pm CST and at other times by appointment. FirstCall maintains live operators 24 hours a day who will assist your personnel in getting out the emergency notification. Our operators are trained and tested, and they are certified 4 times a year.
PRIORITY ZONE CALLING
This is an exclusive feature developed by FirstCall. When you have determined an area to be notified it is often best to notify the people closest to the incident first. In notifications of a thousand or more people this feature can save lives effectively by getting instructions to those closest to the incident first. FirstCall's system creates different zones in the notification area and assigns calling priority to those numbers closest to the incident. FirstCall saves seconds, seconds save lives.
SECTORS AND HOTSPOTS
Our advanced mapping software allows us to create areas of concern that can be preprogrammed and waiting to send a warning. These areas are usually recognized or potential trouble areas. FirstCall and our tech team work very hard to provide all the tools necessary to manage your emergency needs.
MAPPING
Our mapping software can manually draw streets, thus insuring that all areas (even new subdivisions that might not appear on conventional maps for years) will be covered in your emergency notifications. Our techs will work with your emergency manager to make sure all maps are updated and providing the highest standard.
DETAILED ACTIVATION REPORTS
When an incident requiring notification takes place, your emergency managers need to know who was called and how the calls were received. The FirstCall Network sends detailed reports via email and/or fax as soon as notifications are completed. This report is a valuable tool for emergency managers wishing to use their resources as efficiently as possible.
NOTIFICATION TYPES
FirstCall’s interactivity allows you to gather information from message recipients during the activation. A standard interactive message will wait for a single or two (2) digit response from the message recipient and print the response next to the recipient’s phone number and address in the report. These standard interactive messages can be done “on the fly” with a custom message to allow you to tailor the responses that will be recorded to your exact specifications and or needs. *More complicated interactive messages can be set up to gather up to five individual two-digit responses from the message recipient. These messages will need to be set up with FirstCall in advance in the same manner as a prerecorded message.
In municipalities and industries it is important to notify your emergency staff and or your emergency response teams. These teams must be called to action. FirstCall allows all customers to have many fixed lists of people that can be notified by just calling the list. This gets the fastest response time from your emergency people and gets them on the way to the incident or their assigned duties. FirstCall can call one or many lists instantly and then do the public notification.
While fixed lists are sufficient for many situations, our geographic activations provide a further degree of speed and flexibility to our already distinguished system. With our advanced mapping software we can select areas of any necessary size or shape and the system will simultaneously construct a call list of all relevant phones within those areas. This list is stored in our system for future reference in case the exact same area needs to be notified again (common in hazmat spills where an area might receive a "Shelter In Place" message and the same area must receive an "All Clear" message some time later).
Notifications and messages can be delivered over the FirstCall Emergency Notification Network to hearing impaired people who use text telephones, commonly known as TTY or TDD devices. For more information on how to enable FirstCall notifications to reach the hearing impaired, please contact us at 1-800-653-9232.
FirstCall realizes that emergencies are handled on a local level and we are used to outsource the notification through our database and our many digital lines. In order to serve our customers better we have built a Virtual Private Network. Our customers can access their database and maps over the internet with a secure connection. This allows local officials to choose the area of notification as well as choose either a scripted message or create a custom message. This VPN feature is just like the remote terminal but it is accessed over the internet. FirstCall has a full T1's bandwidth available for high-speed transmission and access to graphics (mapping) and using the FirstCall database and outbound lines for emergency notification. This feature has many layers of security. FirstCall trains your operators in its use and as with all our users we are always available to role play and train your staff of emergency personnel.
The FirstCall Network program has the ability to notify numeric and alpha numeric pagers by delivering a numeric message through fixed lists.
Our system is able to send SMS text messages to cell phones and similar devices. Messages can be prerecorded or created at the time of the activation.
Using a fixed list notification database of fax numbers, FirstCall now offers the ability to send thousands of faxes in a matter of seconds to targeted law enforcement agencies, search teams, and the like. Those faxes can be a description of a suspect, an artist's sketch of a perpetrator, a picture of a missing person, or any pertinent information that will aid in the recovery of the victim. The most important benefit of FaxFacts Alert is that valuable time is not lost disseminating critical information. Speed dramatically increases the chance of recovery. FirstCall can also provide the option of sending these faxes as emails.
FirstCall recognizes the cultural diversity that exists throughout the world. It is estimated that in our country alone, over 70 different languages are spoken. As the leader in emergency notification, it is incumbent upon FirstCall to eliminate any language barriers when they arise that may cost even one life. Therefore, in conjunction with the recognized world leader in interpretation and translation, FirstCall now provides the option of immediate, over-the-phone translation and recording of the necessary emergency notification message in over 140 different languages. Quality, professional translation can turn a barely discernable communication into a clearly understood message to people of different languages. Most importantly, that speed and clarity will save more lives.
© 2008, FirstCall Interactive