Aug. 16 -- Officials with The Woodlands Fire Department are encouraging all residents of the township to register themselves and create a profile with Smart911, a free service associated with the Montgomery County Emergency Communications District intended to help first responders when an emergency occurs.
Deputy Fire Chief Doug Adams, with The Woodlands Fire Department, said the Smart911 program allows residents to make an online profile with specific details such as medical conditions, number of people living in a residence, details of where elderly or children may sleep, whether or not pets are in the home and other information that could help first responders react in a better manner to any situation, whether it is a fire, natural disaster or crime incident.
“We are encouraging people to sign up with Smart911,” Adams said. “We did have a record number during (Hurricane) Harvey that signed up. It is great to get people to sign up, the hard part is getting them to keep (the account) active.”
Fire Chief Alan Benson said the Smart911 program allows first responders to better cope with any incident no matter where it occurs by giving emergency responders more detail information.
Smart911 - By The Numbers
“You can put in your own personal profile for yourself, your family, or your home. It also has a commercial side to it, where they can do a facility profile,” Benson said.
The commercial aspect of the program is called RAVE Facility, Benson noted, and allows institutions, businesses and other people associated with other buildings to make a “facility profile.”
“For instance, if you had a campus, a school — The Woodlands High School — with a ball field and all that. If you have a student who is on a parking lot adjacent to the baseball field, and they hit (911) with their cell, they’ll alert our dispatch center and they’ll know exactly where the call is coming from. They won’t waste time, they’ll go to the exact spot, not the whole campus.”
“We’re actually working with our schools to get on board. We’re encouraging all facilities to input their profile, it is very valuable to us,” Benson added.
Andrea Wilson, the public education coordinator with Montgomery County Emergency Communications District, said the Smart911 program is owned by a private business called RAVE Mobile Safety. The company’s products are free and being used more increasinly by emergency communications entities across Texas and the United States.
The Smart911 feature is intended for individual people or families, while the RAVE Facility feature is intended for businesses, schools and other buildings, she added.
“Basically, (people) can go in and create a household profile,” Wilson said of the program. “If a (911) call is placed, the profile pops up on the dispatcher’s screen and the dispatcher can see the information.”
Wilson said the Smart911 program is especially invaluable to emergency dispatchers because an estimated 80 percent of all 911 calls now originate from a cellular phone, numbers of which are not normally associated with a physical address like traditional land lines are.
Including among the things one can put into a personal or home profile, Wilson explained, are details such as what medications a person or family member takes or is allergic to; whether or not young children are present in a home; if anyone at a residence is disabled or has another type of handicap; and information about pets. The profile can also hold photographs of children in the event of a kidnapping or missing person, information on vehicles such as license plate number and make and model — which is important for silver or amber alerts — and any emergency contacts a family may need.
Wilson said the only required data to sign up for the free Smart911 is a person’s name, address and telephone number, the other information is optional, but the more details a person provides, the better first responders can react and help in time of need. Profiles are active in six-month periods and unless they are renewed every six months, the data becomes what Wilson described as “not viewable” by dispatchers.
People who opt to join the Smart911 program can also enroll in AlertMCTX, which is a feature that will send text messages to people during emergencies or disaster like Hurricane Harvey. Wilson said officials hope more people sign up for the Smart911, noting that small numbers of people have enrolled in the program with most sign-ups happening in August 2017.
“It has been a slow roll (of sign-ups). The biggest period was about this time last year (2017) as people anticipated Hurricane Harvey,” Wilson said. “The end goal is to have as much information as possible to help first responders.”
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