Jim Wells County expands phone alerts for emergencies and disasters

Jim Wells County, the City of Alice and the City of Orange Grove have launched Be Alert, a mass-notification system that can push warnings about severe weather, evacuations, road closures, boil-water notices and other urgent disruptions straight to residents’ phones. People can sign up by scanning a QR code, clicking a registration link or texting or calling “alerts” to 361-415-7015.

The system is built for the kind of emergencies that do not stay in one place for long. Residents can customize alert preferences and add multiple locations such as home, work and school, which gives the county a way to reach people who move across the county during the day and may miss a warning on social media or hear about it only after the danger has already shifted. In Alice, Orange Grove, Premont and San Diego, that matters when one neighborhood is under threat while another is still clear. People who split time between home, work and school, along with residents in outlying areas such as Ben Bolt-Green Acres and Tecolote, are the ones most likely to benefit first from signing up.

Jim Wells County Emergency Management lists Lance Brown as emergency management coordinator, and his office is at 200 N. Almond Street, Ste. B-109, in Alice. County officials also say the weather alert system is more precise than FEMA’s cellphone alerts, giving local responders another channel when timing is critical.

Be Alert is only one layer of the county’s warning network. Jim Wells County and the City of Alice operate eight outdoor warning sirens, with six spread throughout Alice, one south of Alice in the Ben Bolt-Green Acres area and one in the Tecolote area north of Alice on County Road 120 west of Highway 281. Those sirens are meant to alert citizens when severe weather or a hazardous materials emergency is approaching, which makes the phone system a complement to the sirens rather than a replacement.

The newer platform also marks a change from the county’s earlier Blackboard Connect setup, which Jim Wells County and the City of Alice split at an annual cost of $14,654. A recent county report said the previous system had failed to meet expectations. Be Alert now gives county officials a more flexible way to send targeted notices to households and businesses, especially when the first warning of a storm or public-safety hazard needs to reach the widest possible audience fast.