Lawrence launching new alert system for city residents

LAWRENCE, Ind. (WISH) — Lawrence residents will now have custom emergency alerts for their city.

The new system is called Code RED and the sign-up stage launched Thursday afternoon.

The city’s Chief Information Officer Josh Fetzer picked the Code RED program because it can reach people through so many channels.

“We can do just a robo call to a phone number, we can do text messages, we can do email notifications,” he said.

Fetzer showed us where to sign up for the alerts.

“Go to the city website, there is a Code RED link in the middle of the front page you can click on and either opt-in or opt-out from there,” he said

Just enter your address, phone and email. You can register for emergency alerts only.

“Those can range from chemical spills that may be on the interstate or Amber Alerts and Silver Alerts,” Fetzer said.

Or you can also opt-in for the less urgent general notifications.

“Marathons that are causing road closures,” he said.

With the program, you can register both your phone number as well as your email and you can even set it up so that you only get emergency alerts on your phone and emergency and general alerts will go to your email.

Fetzer said the city doesn’t want to bombard its residents with alerts, but it will be positive to have the channel available in case they need to use it.

“It’s a water main break that could affect traffic flow or it’s a major incident that we hope doesn’t happen but if it does we can keep citizens informed,” Lawrence Police Captain Gary Woodruff said.

There’s no word on when alerts will start going out, but we’ll be sure to keep you updated.

If you remember, Fishers actually implemented the same system and had some technical issues.

We reached out to Code RED Thursday about those issues. They said since then they’ve upgraded to an enhanced platform and don’t anticipate the same bugs.