Evaluation of the use of Reverse 911 in Santa Clara County

Reverse 9-1-1
Name:
Course:
Tutor
Date:
Introduction
Reverse 9-1-1 is a communication system that upholds public safety. This communication system was developed by the custodian communication, which is part of the larger EADS in North America. It was initially known as Plant CML (Sammamish, 2010). This system has found application in communication between groups of people who are located in the same area, in the United States and Canada. It makes use of telephone numbers’ database and addresses associated with them. This information is tied together in a system known as the geographical Information system in a way that emergency notifications recorded can be delivered to a group of telephone subscribers in a given region or locality. This system has substantially been used in the United States. This is a safety system that was designed in order to inform a large group of people in a given geographical location about an impending danger. This system has been successfully used in a number of areas including in Boston during the 2010 water emergency. Through this system, the residents of this area were advised to boil their drinking water. Approximately 1500 residents of Colorado were as well notified using this system about the 2004 bulldozer rampage (Pierceall, 2010). These among others are incidences were Reverse 9-1-1 has been successfully used. One significant disadvantage associated with this system is its ability to cater for people faced with the same danger but in different locations. As a good example, a danger that involves consumers of a certain product who are not in one locality but are spread over a wide area may not be effectively handled by this system. This is because numbers of people in the same region are registered as one group. Notifications are sent to a group of people in the same region. This poses a challenge as far as sending of these notifications are concerned. There is the need to develop a notification system that will take care of diversity in the location of the people who are in danger (Henry, 2010).
Santa Clara County is among many other counties that have embraced and extensively used reverse 9-1-1 system in an attempt to deal with emergencies. The medical delivery department has employed this system in providing ambulance services in emergencies. The county of Santa Clara has signed a contract with rural metro to deliver ambulance services to emergency (Jackson, 2008). The success of this program has substantially been applauded as a major step towards safety in Santa Clara County. Under this contact, ambulances are now able to arrive at the scene of emergency on time, as opposed to the initial delay.
Yet in another area where Santa Clara County has been, using Reverse 9-1-1 is in dealing with emergency fire. This system, in Santa Clara County, was expanded t...