Madison County to test emergency alert system Thursday

Madison County will test its emergency notification system Thursday, April 2, as part of a statewide drill coordinated by the Texas Division of Emergency Management.

The test runs between 10 a.m. and 12:30 p.m. Residents signed up for the county’s Genasys A!ERT system will receive a message confirming it is only a test and that no action is needed.

“It’s basically just going to say this is a test, it is not an actual emergency and no action is needed,” Emergency Management Coordinator Shelly Butts said.

The statewide drill comes after flash floods killed more than 130 people in the Hill Country last July and exposed failures in local warning systems across the region. Several counties involved in that disaster had not activated their notification platforms during critical hours, according to officials.

Butts said the tragedy changed how the state looks at emergency readiness but hasn’t altered Madison County’s own operations.

“That particular event was heavily dependent on river gauges and timing of those gauges and a wall of water,” Butts said. “That’s a little bit different than what we normally think of as emergency notification.”

She said the county uses its Genasys system regularly for burn bans and weather alerts.

“There are lots of vendors across the nation who provide these types of services, and several counties and regions used a different vendor in the past and they recently had problems with it,” Butts said. “So that brought about the idea that we really need to test everybody statewide to make sure that everybody’s systems are working like they should.”

The county currently has 1,041 registered users and 4,952 total contacts in the system. Residents can sign up to receive text message, email or call alerts on more than one phone or address.

“If you want to put in your address and then maybe your children’s address, or your parents’ address … notifications that might come across for the Midway area for weather might not come across for the North Zulch area,” Butts said.

Butts said she sent information about the test to local schools, daycares and the city of Midway. If a real emergency occurs during the test window, the message will not include the word “test.”

She urged residents to sign up for more than one way to receive notifications and to check their account information periodically to make sure it is current.

“We want to make sure we have more than one tool in our toolbox,” Butts said.

Residents can register for Madison County A!ERT notifications at madison.genasys.com/ portal.

Updates are also available at facebook. com/MadisonCountyOfficeofEmergencyManagement.