New Haven Independent

The occasion was a pitch from a salesman for a new system for getting the word out in emergencies, and at other times, through massive, immediate phone calls, e-mails, and text messages to citizens’ PDAs.

A nuke melts down? Need to tell all 41,000 households and businesses in New Haven what to do? Hire my company, Dan Petersen told the officials, and “in less than 40 minutes, you can contact the entire city.”

Petersen works for Stow, Mass.-based Connect-CTY. He claimed his company arranges 10 million calls a month for 10,000 client municipalities and school districts across the country. The local governments don’t buy equipment or make the calls. They work with the company to develop lists of all citizens’ phone numbers, then they use the company’s system to send automated messages.

During Hurricane Katrina, for instance, St. Charles Parish, La., officials who fled town got messages to its citizens through Connect-CTY’s system, which operates from a variety of remote locations.

The system is designed to send not just emergency information about floods or storms to the whole city, or to groups of city employees or first responders. It also surveys, say, a neighborhood about an upcoming project; updates people on changes in parking rules or public meetings; sends out word about missing children.

It can also, in a modern recorded-automatic voice kind of way, “check in” on seniors. Petersen (pictured) described a sample call. “If everything’s fine… and you have plenty of water, press 2,” the voice tells the senior. “Press 3” if you need more water. Is this an emergency? Press 4.

He described how Somerville, Mass., officials used data from the system to placate a peeved constituent. A small business owner complained that he hadn’t received a call about a power outage. A city official checked the database and learned that the business owner had earlier received, and picked up, a call about a shift in a parade schedule. On the power outage, the automated caller got the business owner’s voicemail. Told about this, the business owner, said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t check my voicemail. Thank you very much.”

Ideally, the database would have up to three phone numbers per citizen, and the system would try all three before leaving a voicemail message, Petersen said.

In response to a question, Petersen declined to identify where the company’s servers are located.

The city will be checking into competitors’ plans, too, according to Chief Administrative Officer John Buturla. It wasn’t even at the point of getting a price estimate from Petersen. The city has begun what will probably be an 18-month process of finding the right system, Buturla said. But in concept the city does want to put a system like this into place.