The Douglas County Citizen Emergency Notification System (DCENS) can be used to notify the public with important information during an emergency. Emergencies happen with little or no notice at any time of the day or night. With DCENS, we can relay critical information to you about natural disasters or other emergencies that require your immediate attention.

Douglas County currently receives all landline phone numbers from the local phone companies. These phone numbers are all automatically enrolled and will receive alerts based on their home address. For people who only have cellular phones, Voice Over IP (VoIP) phones, or for those people who want to register additional phones, you will need to go to the opt-in registration page and register your phones.

Emergency Alert Number

Emergency alerts sent from Douglas County will come through with the following Caller ID displayed: 541-391-5123. If you would like to hear the last alert you received repeated, simply dial the Caller ID number back. Text messages will be sent from 88911.

Important - Read Before Registering

In the event of an emergency, Douglas County officials can identify the affected area and send a message that describes the situation and recommends the protective actions residents should take. The DCENS  will automatically call out to all land-line and opt-in telephone numbers within that geographic area and deliver the recorded message once a voice is heard. If your phone line is busy, the system will attempt to redial the number three times to make contact. If an answering machine picks up the call, the emergency message will be left on the machine.

Some of the many uses of the system include:

• Tsunami Warnings
• Emergency Evacuations
• Natural Disaster Alerts
• Missing Child Alerts
• Hazardous Material Leaks
• Neighborhood Emergency Incidents

DCENS Limitations

As with any system, DCENS has its limitations.

If linked to a specific address, the location of the cell phone number becomes essentially fixed to that location. This could lead to the situation of a cell phone being notified when the user is mobile and well out of the affected area. Or conversely, the situation where the user is mobile, is in the affected area, but is not notified because the fixed location of the number is in an unaffected area. Please consider this when registering cell phone information for addition to the database.

Keeping Informed

Keep in mind that DCENS is an excellent enhancement to our effort to share emergency information with our citizens, but registration will not guarantee notification of any specific event. You are still encouraged to visit our website and to stay tuned to local news channels and radio stations during a community crisis.

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