The town’s emergency manager, Joel Schieffer, urged residents to register for the town’s mass-notification services and described a suite of preparedness steps for families.

Schieffer said the town is promoting the Rave (Smart911) notification platform as the primary means to push official emergency alerts to residents by phone, text and email. He gave multiple signup options — prescottvalleyalerts.gov, scanning an on-screen QR code, smart911.com or the Smart911 mobile app — and said the system is privacy-protective: “They are very secure with, with all their information, very privacy concerned, and they do not actually even share your information with me,” he said.

Schieffer also explained a separate mapping and evacuation app, Genesis Protect, which shows users their area in town and can push evacuation or shelter-in-place messages based on location. “Its primary use is for you to go in and look and see what area you're in…if you should be evacuating, if you should be sheltering in place,” he said. He noted Genesis Protect requires location services enabled on a user’s device to provide area-based alerts.

Schieffer urged residents to develop an out-of-area family contact and to build robust emergency kits. “For years and years you probably heard you need 3 days food… we’re really pushing everyone to have 2 weeks food, 2 weeks water, 2 weeks prescriptions,” he said. He also encouraged residents to learn evacuation routes in potentially difficult-to-evacuate neighborhoods and to volunteer with organizations such as the Red Cross.

Schieffer said materials about the alert systems were available at the meeting and that staff would remain after the presentation to assist with signups and follow-up questions.