Emanuel County is launching a new public alert system this month, and county officials are asking every resident to register, including anyone who was already signed up with the county’s previous provider.
The county’s former system, CodeRED, failed during Hurricane Helene and remained unreliable in the months that followed. Since then, Emanuel County joined a nationwide exodus as cities and counties across the country severed ties with CodeRED at the same time. Local staff spent months testing replacement systems before settling on a two-part approach that, at its core, is meant to prevent a single point of failure from leaving the county in the dark again.
Emergency Management Agency (EMA) Director Courtney Terwilliger initiated the change and led the early exploration and transition away from CodeRED.
“He really got this up off the ground,” Foster Grimes, Emanuel County Fire Coordinator and Deputy EMA Director, said. “I give a lot of credit to him for recognizing, along with everybody else, that CodeRED wasn’t working and seeing to it that we do something about it.”
That “something” became a two-part system built around redundancy.
“We built this new system so that we never find ourselves in the situation we did with the CodeRED problems,” Grimes said. “In theory, we should be able to reach our folks in one way or another.”
The new system works in two parts.
Together, they make up what the county is calling Emanuel County Mass Notifications.
The first part connects the county to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) national alert network. County staff administer this part through a platform called AlertSense.
It sends messages for serious, life-safety emergencies such as an active shooter, bomb threats, a hazardous materials incident, or other immediate threats requiring urgent public action. In those cases, the county can push an alert directly to any capable cell phone within the county’s borders, the same way an Amber Alert reaches the public. No sign-up is required for this part of the system; any resident within the physical bounds of Emanuel County will have the alert reach their phone automatically.
The second part of Emanuel County Mass Notifications is administered through CivicPlus, the county’s website provider. Residents interact with this part of the system through the Resident Portal on the county website, where they can sign up and manage the types of alerts they want to receive.
“Now, if what you’re looking for out of a mass notification system from your local government is weather alerts, pay attention,” Grimes said, “because this second part, the portal, is what does that. It’s probably the part that looks and feels most like what people think of when they think of CodeRED.”
The county has already built templates for black ice and winter storms, dense fog, extreme cold and extreme heat, flash flooding, high wind, tropical storm and hurricane warnings, nuclear warnings, fire hazard weather and wildfire warnings, severe thunderstorms and tornado warnings, and toxic smoke. This list reflects a clear focus on warnings; the county has opted to forgo watches altogether.
“There’s already enough confusion around weather in everyday life,” Grimes said. “If you stopped 10 people on the street and asked them the difference between a watch and a warning, I’m not sure how many could tell you. Basically, a watch means something could happen. A warning means it’s happening or it’s about to. For our purposes, we’d rather focus on what’s real and what people need to act on.”
But the Resident Portal goes well beyond weather. It also handles routine, non-emergent notices residents might appreciate in their day to day.
Importantly, though, this part requires registration.
Residents can opt in to Weather Alerts, Emergency Alerts, regular Notifications or any combination of the three.
In addition to weather alerts, CivicPlus can deliver the same emergency messages as the first part of the system as a backup for redundancy, along with notices the federal system is not designed to carry, including boil water advisories, road closures and traffic hazards, election reminders, meeting notices, deadline reminders and more.
“This new 2-prong approach, especially the CivicPlus part, is so much more robust and gives us a lot of flexibility and customization,” County Clerk Halei Lamb said. “Like, we can now send jury duty cancellation notices for our clerk of court, share updates from our recreation department. Eventually, we may even use it to send internal alerts to our employees. CodeRED couldn’t do any of that.”
Lamb continued, reiterating the importance of opting in.
“Like Foster said, this is the part of Mass Notifications people have to act on. It’s a great system, but it won’t work very well for you if you don’t sign up. Foster has been pestering CodeRED for months about our contact list. We’re not sure if this is intentional or if it’s a data issue on their end related to the outage pre-Helene, but for whatever reason, we haven’t gotten it, so we need everyone to sign up again. To be clear, let me say it again: it doesn’t matter if you signed up for CodeRED in the past. Everybody has to sign up again if you want weather alerts.”
Registering takes about two minutes on the county’s website. In doing so, residents choose how they want to be reached: text, email, phone call, or any combination. They’re also now in charge of what categories of alerts they want to receive: Emergency Alerts, regular Notifications, Weather alerts, all three, or a specific mix-and-match.
Lamb says the process should be user-friendly for “tech-savvy” residents. The mobile- and desktop-compatible portal is public-facing today for those who want to complete it on their own. It’s linked to the Notifications button on the homepage of the county website.
“Here’s another really great, cool thing about the direction we went: CivicPlus allows us to push alerts directly to Facebook. Again, CodeRED didn’t do that,” Lamb added.
There is no hard go-live date. Instead, the county has opted to trickle out implementation of Mass Notifications, putting it to use when needed. The quieter rollout is meant to give the county an opportunity to put the system to work without turning its launch into a production, while also leaving room to learn, adjust, and improve it as they go.
Unknowingly, some residents have already started seeing some of them on Facebook in recent weeks.
“We put out a thunderstorm warning and apparently it didn’t rain a drop for somebody,” Grimes said with a laugh. “Unfortunately, that’s going to happen sometimes. The weather component is based on the National Weather Service. We do not control that now, nor will we ever. Nor do we want to, if I’m being honest. We’d rather leave that to the professionals. But to give you the gist, a warning covers the whole area where conditions could turn dangerous, not just the spot where you’re standing, and to that point, we’d always rather give people a warning than not. What you do or don’t do with that information is entirely up to you.”
Behind the scenes, the county has also built a library of graphics for alerts alerts posted on Facebook and the website and linked in alerts delivered via text.
By design, neither AlertSense nor CivicPlus are hard-coded for graphics. This was an extra step the county took.
“As badly as this sounds, people are lazy content consumers these days. We’ve gotten spoiled with videos on our feeds. You better at least give them a picture if you want them to stop, so that’s what we did,” Lamb said. “And we were intentional during the design process so the graphics work at a glance. They don’t require any brain power. Of course, there’s a line or two of text on them with a relevant icon in the background, but we also color-coded everything. For example, graphics in the county’s signature green, Pine Thicket, are reserved for everyday information.”
Meanwhile, red marks life-threatening emergencies.
“We don’t have red in our county brand palette, but we wanted something that would stop folks in their tracks,” Lamb said. “We wanted something bright and urgent.”
Brown-toned graphics signal an update to a previous alert with a yellow bar across the top marking what kind of update it is.
“I hope over time, people come to learn and understand the difference. I hope we can save some lives this way,” Lamb said. “If there’s a tornado on the ground, we hope you don’t even have to read the warning. We hope you see the icon, see red, and head for cover.”
However, weather alerts have a special exception: the county generally will not issue updates for those.
“Our thought process there was, we believe in most cases, residents can usually tell when an immediate threat like a tornado or severe thunderstorm has passed. Alert fatigue is a real thing, and we don’t want to wear our folks out,” Grimes said. “If we see there’s a special circumstance where it might be good to break this rule and issue another alert, we can certainly do that, but as a general rule of thumb, we’re planning to let you know on the front end and leave it at that.”
The font on the graphics is intentional as well.
When the county redesigned its website in 2023, staff chose a clean, simple sans-serif font called Figtree (the typeface of this paragraph). Unlike a traditional serif font such as Times New Roman, Figtree’s letters have no small decorative strokes at the ends, and its open, evenly spaced characters are generally easier to read at a glance, especially on a screen.
The choice put the county ahead of a requirement that didn’t exist yet: in April 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local government websites to meet specific digital accessibility standards, known as Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.1. Emanuel County’s compliance deadline under that rule isn’t until 2028, but the groundwork, including font choice, is already in place.
“When we decided to add graphics to the Mass Notifications system, we knew right away which font we wanted to use. It had to be Figtree. It’s a pretty nerdy or niche thing to consider, but we knew it would be important for someone who’s scrolling on Facebook. There’s enough noise on social media, so you need to use every advantage you can to get them to stop.”
The new alert system follows two other recent public safety upgrades in Emanuel County. In 2023, the county moved 911 dispatch out of a flood-prone basement and into a new, state-of-the-art emergency operations center on East Moring Street. Last fall, a countywide digital radio system went live, connecting more than 200 first responders across eight municipalities on a single network.
Chairman and District 4 Commissioner Jim Sherrod says this one project brings all of that work full-circle.
“Those first two projects fixed how our first responders and emergency workers talk to each other,” he said. “This one fixes how we at the county talk to everybody else. I think once it catches on, it’s going to be good. I think people are really going to love it.”
In the coming weeks, the county will ramp up efforts to get residents registered.
“We’re looking at coordinating with the senior center and spending a day out there to help their clients sign up,” Lamb said. “That’s one of the key groups we want to focus on because we know, statistically speaking, that generation is the least likely to sign up on their own online.”
The county will also install poster easels at county offices and other high-traffic locations throughout the community, along with printed flyers.
“A banner across Highway 1 would be a dream,” Lamb said.
The county will also share information on social media, including a short instructional video that walks residents through the new system and its sign-up process.
Residents who want to sign up right now can scan the QR code below and follow the steps that appear.
“Just… Please don’t ask the staff at the tag office or tax office to sign you up,” Lamb said. “This has been a public safety project from the start. We don’t mean that in a selfish way; we just don’t want to add this responsibility to the plates of other staff members whose job this isn’t. They are busy enough, and truly, they won’t know the system just yet. If you need help, just call one of us.”
Grimes is quick to credit other county’s leaders in addition to Terwilliger for clearing the way for the change.
“We recovered part of the cost through CivicPlus, but this was still a real investment. It came out of public safety budget, so it didn’t require a new line item or anything, but still, the commissioners are who set the budget and determine how much funding we get as a department. They’ve shown in the past that they’re committed to public safety, and I think this just continues that support. We’re grateful, and I think the broader public will be, too.”
Lamb concluded candidly about what residents should expect in the early going.
“Please be patient and gracious with us. This is a brand new system, so we expect a few hiccups along the way,” Lamb said. “We’ve still got to train some employees and there will probably be things we have to tweak, like how long an alert lasts, but we believe we’ve got it to a place where it can do the job that matters most, helping save lives, while we keep working to get everything perfected.”
The Emanuel County Board of Commissioners governs Emanuel County, focusing on legislative and administrative responsibilities. Comprised of representatives from five districts, the board oversees policies and programs that impact local development, budgeting, and public services. Commissioners work collectively to ensure fiscal responsibility and address community needs, collaborating with other county departments and agencies. They are committed to supporting economic growth, public safety, and community well-being across Emanuel County.
For information about the commissioners and for the latest from the county government, visit 124 North Main Street in Swainsboro; call 478-237-3881; follow us on Facebook; or visit www.emanuelco-ga.gov.
