Longview Hills @ Newport Oregon

New Alert System for Community Awareness

ron thomas

Notifying residents of community problems such as "water loss", "Electrical outages", "Icy pavement leaving park", "Trees Down", "Flood conditions", "Tsunami Alerts" and other events has long been a concern at LVH.

We have tried many ideas such as telephone trees and the LVH FRS radio Net on Ch6. Neighborhood Watch was interwoven among these processes and yet if we were to grade ourselves on their success in keeping the entire community informed and upto date we would be charitable to award a D+ for our efforts.

That is not to say that the very few that tried their best to make a broken system work did not do a good job because they were all outstanding. What is broke is the way we do things. The CERT team (our community Safety team) has a new idea that we have been testing since January and it looks like it is going to work close to 99% of the time ( a real improvement). We have found a phone dialing service that our people can initiate a call we record ourselves and it will go to every phone listed in 2 minutes flat. That means all 186 homes in the park will be notified within 2 minutes. There will be a cost associated with making all those calls. It will cost about $8 to notify the whole community. The Social Club voted to pay $25 for the year for keeping time available for calls. That means three alerts.

When you get a call from the service it will start by mentioning LVH as its source with the alert following. At the end of the announcement you will be advised to tune to CH6 FRS and ask for updates or to call the Park Manager. If you are not available it will put the recording on your answering machine. It will send calls to Cell Phones.

At the end of this automatic phone session a report is generated by a computer on line that lets us see if the call was answered by a human or went to message. If no answer is received the phone dialer tries 3 more times and then quits. The person receiving the report then knows who received the call and who did not.

Their TERMS OF SERVICE dictate that our list is strictly confidential and will not be used for any other purpose by the phone dialer service. The phone numbers on the community phone list are the ones that will be entered for this service.

If your phone number is not upto date on community phone directory you won't get a call.

For those that want to opt out of this phone dialer service, for whatever reason, please print you name on the Opt out list below the clubhouse bulletin board.

Lastly, the LVH Radio Net will no longer call for Sunday night radio checks. Most of the time certain community members will voluntarily monitor FRS CH6. If you have a problem you can try to contact one of them and you are all welcome to use it as a source to practice and chat with one another to gain experience.