LONGMEADOW – The town is hoping that more residents will sign up for its civic ready outreach system, which launched in July. Thus far, the number of people that have signed up for the system has been less than anticipated.

Fire Chief John Dearborn told Reminder Publications more than 1,000 residents have signed up for emergency notifications through the system.

“We haven’t had as many people sign up for, especially the community notification part of it, as we have liked,” Dearborn said. “It means a lot to us to get information out to our residents and this is the tool that we’ve selected.”

The system is used as a tool to communicate with the public about road closures, trash pickup delays, water main breaks and shutdowns, severe weather alerts, and Department of Public Works (DPW) notifications, he said.

“You can select how you want to be notified by email, voicemail, or text messaging, ” he explained. “You can go ahead and register and select how you want to be notified and actually the other really cool part is you can select when you get notified.”

He added it only takes a few minutes to sign up for the notification system.

“We really highly recommend that everyone log in to the system and sign up for those emergency alerts,” Dearborn said. “We do have the ability to override the system in a major emergency where we can send out to everybody even if they’re not registered, but we prefer that everyone register and select how they want to be notified.” 

With the winter season now in full swing, Dearborn said he believes the system is more valuable than ever to residents.

“Recently we had to delay trash pick up because of weather,” he noted. “We do utilize Facebook. The town has a Facebook account, but we want to try to get this message out as quickly as possible … We’d really like to get every household in town signed up for these notifications so when we have a trash delay or a water main break or a road closure we can actually really communicate that with the community.”

To sign up for the notification system visit www.ma-longmeadow.civicready.com.

Dearborn said any individual who doesn’t have an email account to sign up could be assisted by the Fire Department by calling 567-3357. For any additional questions email lemd@longmeadow.org.