This is a test

Pine Haven’s emergency system, including siren, email alerts and text messages informing residents of an emergency situation and what actions are recommended, was tested last Tuesday morning, and a couple of glitches were found.

While the siren worked without a hitch, one of the issues with texting is specifically for those subscribed to Verizon.

“We discovered people with Verizon phones were only getting the first sentence,” emergency alert coordinator Chris Bingham explained. “We shortened [the message] up and they still didn’t get it.”

She said that four out of five people with Verizon did not receive the message.

The coordinators then began efforts to ascertain why this phone carrier is having such difficulty supplying full text messages, “Because if we have an actual emergency, we need more than ten words to tell them what the emergency is and what they should do.”

The other problem is that a few residents, believing themselves subscribed to the town’s emergency alert system, have either changed their phone number or carrier since signing up and have not informed the clerk’s office or have not actually signed up at all. Mayor John Cook advises everyone who did not receive a text message and/or email for last Tuesday’s test alert to contact the clerk’s office to ensure their active subscription to the system.