FORT SILL, Okla. (July 24, 2014) -- The Fort Sill community now has a new system for notifying Soldiers, DA civilians and contractors of significant events that may be affecting the post and surrounding civilian areas.
Known as AtHoc, the program is a unified mass warning notification system that can contact individuals through their desktop computer, their business phone, personal cell phone or any device that can receive text messages or emails.
Ken Ray, operations branch chief for the Directorate of Plans, Training, Mobilization and Security, explained how the system works at Fort Sill.
"AtHoc is Web-based so that administrators can log in and pre-setup the notification groups, based on the various situations. If there was a weather warning, say a tornado watch or warning, or a recall of personnel, or any other kind of notification you want to get out to the mass population instantly, you can go in and use the templates or create a new one quickly to send it out," Ray said.
"We have the desktop notification system here at Fort Sill. Notifications will go to the desktop computers first. If you are logged into your computer Monday through Friday, you will see the notifications pop up. We can use different types of acknowledgements that can be as simple as a question the recipient responds to with the appropriate answer.
"If you have your AtHoc profile set up correctly, it will send out a notice to your work email, or if you put in your home email, it will send a notice to that address. You can put in your work phone number or your cell phone number so it will send an automated message to your phones. In addition, you can set up the short message service and it will send text messages to your cell phone. It will go wherever you want it to go," Ray said.
The system is being used by the departments of Defense and Homeland Security; other government agencies on the national, state and local levels; as well as businesses; industry; healthcare agencies; and local fire and emergency service. The more people who are contacted and informed, the more they will be able to respond safely during a disaster or crisis.
Ray also said if the post is conducting an accountability drill and wants to know where everybody is, the system will go out and ask each individual, "Are you present for duty? Are you TDY? Are you on leave?" and the person responds by pressing the appropriate number - 1, 2 or 3 - on his or her phone and the system records the response.
"In the old days when you did a personnel recall, you would have to use the recall list and everyone on the 'telephone tree' would call the person below them. That could take a lot of time, but now you don't have to do that anymore," he said. "This system instantly targets who you want to get in touch with and gets the message out all at once. Right now at Fort Sill this is a relatively new system and we are trying to target all the ways we can reach people. The biggest problem we have is that users don't always fill out all of the contact information in their profile. So the system can't notify people if it doesn't know where they are or how to contact them," Ray said.
"Everyone at Fort Sill needs to fill out all of the points of notification, so we can get the messages out. Our goal is to get 100 percent notification by some means, and we encourage users to update their profiles on a regular basis," Ray added.
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