CAMBRIA & SOMERSET COUNTY, Pa (WJAC) — Emergency officials in Cambria and Somerset counties are working to implement a new alert system after a cyber attack happened on their previous system, CodeRED, making the alert system not operational.
The counties have been without some major emergency capabilities for nearly two months, but officials are hopeful that the new Regroup system they are working to put in place will soon restore their abilities.
The CodeRED system, a national system which had been used for several years in Cambria and Somerset counties to notify residents during emergencies such as flooding or major fires, became unusable following the attack in November.
Tom Davis, director of the Cambria County Department of Emergency Services, says officials were concerned about potential emergencies when they heard the system was down.
“That was on the top of all of our minds when we found out that it was out of service, we weren’t able to use it. I was extremely concerned of us not having the quickest availability to get messages out,” he said.
Officials say CodeRED had several other uses including notifying specialized teams like swift water rescue or hazmat teams, or being used within the EMA department.
“We use it internally for call-offs, we use it to notify our people. So, that’s been somewhat of a problem for us,” Somerset County 911 coordinator Shawn Ware said.
Despite the outage, authorities in Somerset County say they would have been able to send a message to the community if needed with an alternate system called IPAWS, but it is not as effective.
“The disadvantage of that is it hits the entire county simultaneously,” 911 operations manager for Somerset County Craig Hollis-Nicholson says. “The benefit of CodeRED is it allows us to target those messages to specific areas, so instead of sending out those messages to all 73,000 residents in Somerset County, we can maybe send it to 500 of them.”
Davis says Cambria County would have went through PEMA if they had to notify the public of an emergency during this time.
Both counties are now focused on transitioning to the Regroup system, with hopes of restoring full emergency alert capabilities soon.
“Hopefully we’re going to have the new system up and running here in the near future,” Davis said.
Efforts by 6News to reach CodeRED developers for comment have been unsuccessful.
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Somerset County officials are now encouraging the public to sign up for the alert system.
Regroup Somerset County
