By Charles W. Kim, Managing Editor
Around 80 different agencies from seven counties attended a forum Tuesday on how to inform residents during a crisis.
The event, sponsored by South Brunswick Police, focussed on how the various agencies reached the public during the recent Superstorm Sandy.
”People are expecting us to do more,” Sgt. Jim Ryan said following the presentations at the Monmouth Junction firehouse Tuesday morning. “We have raised the level of expectations.”
Sgt. Ryan said the township sent out around 80 messages on the Nixle system during the storm Oct. 29 to let residents know important information including where fallen trees were blocking roads and downing power lines to where people could go after the storm to get gasoline, food or to charge electronic equipment.
He said he was surprised to see around 1,700 people show up at the South Brunswick Public Library after the storm to charge items and warm up.
For the last two years, police have used the free Nixle service, which acts as a communications hub between police and residents.
Nixle spokesman Jim Gatta said the service started in 2010 as a way for emergency responders and other organizations to keep in contact via a website, emails and text messages.
Police, fire and other emergency organizations may use the basic service for free and allow for residents to subscribe to the updates.
According to Mr. Gatta, agencies can put out three types of messages depending on the severity of the issue.
The three types of messages are Community, for general announcements, Advisories, for more serious issues like a traffic accident or construction site blocking traffic, or an Alert, reserved for the most serious types of messages.
Residents that sign up can receive both advisories and alerts via text message as well as online and email, according to Mr. Gatta.
He said the organization will be rolling out upgrades in the future that will cost agencies to use such as an anonymous tip service that people can use to contact police and chat with them in real time without giving out their names.
Mr. Gatta said Nixle saw a 1,500 percent increase in agencies signing up to provide alerts during Sandy as well as a more than 500 percent increase in the number of residents signing up to get the alerts.
In addition to Nixle, other agencies used social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter to put out real time information during the storm, scoring several hundred “likes” within hours of posting on the pages, according to officials.
Sgt. Ryan said that using these tools has become a very important way for the agencies to reach the public with important information and that he hopes residents that have not yet signed up for South Brunswick Police updates on Nixle would do so.
Residents wanting more information on how to sign up for getting the alerts can visit the South Brunswick Post website at http://centraljersey.com/south_brunswick_post/front/ to see the most recent Nixle messages and sign up to get the messages.

