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When some people pick up their telephones and hear an automated recording, their first instinct is to hang up.

But what if the automated voice were relaying important information about a noxious plume of smoke in their neighborhoods, a missing child or even a roadway closure?

That may very well be the case for Oro Valley residents when the town starts using a new system that notifies residents of emergency and non-emergency events via the telephone or e-mail.

The Oro Valley Town Council recently approved spending $60,000 to buy and start up such a system, called Reverse 911. That money will come from within the limits of this fiscal year's budget and the bill will be split evenly among three departments — the police, Public Works and the Water Utility.

Officials hope the community-notification system will be up and running within six months, said Lt. Jason Larter.

With this service, the Oro Valley Police Department and staffers from other town departments will be able to use the police's 911 database to "carve out" a geographic area of the town and send an automated phone call to residents living within those limits affected by the emergency, said Police Chief Danny Sharp.

For example, if someone wandered off from an assisted-living center or a school in a certain neighborhood, the police would notify residents in just that neighborhood.

Hearing-impaired people who use a TTY service will be notified at the same time, Larter said.

Notification of emergencies

The police will use the system to notify residents of emergencies including natural-disaster evacuations, bomb-threat evacuations, smoke pollution and water-contamination issues.

The town already experienced a situation when Reverse 911 would have been useful last November, when a three-alarm fire at Securaplane Technologies Inc., 10800 N. Mavinee Drive, created a plume of smoke in the surrounding area.

At the time, Oro Valley police officers had to go door-to-door to warn neighbors — including the nearby Desert Point-La Reserve Retirement Community — to stay indoors, shut their windows and turn off their air conditioning to protect them from the smoke.

Reverse 911 will reduce the need for door-to-door notification since the system lets the department know how many messages have been delivered either to a person picking up the phone or an answering machine, Sharp said.

Residents who listen to the message will be able to confirm that they heard it — and, if necessary, indicate whether they will or won't evacuate, Larter said.

This is important because the department will be able to notify residents more quickly and, if the area affected is contaminated by a cloud of smoke or other hazard, keep police officers out of danger, he said.

Town plans to limit calls

The town plans to take steps to ensure that the phone calls are helpful to residents and not a nuisance.

Oro Valley must be judicious about the number and type of phone notifications it sends, Oro Valley spokesman Bob Kovitz said. "We don't want the calls to disturb people."

Town staffers are aware of how sensitive some people were to the frequent automated phone calls many received during last fall's election campaign, and they don't want people to feel the same way about Reverse 911, he said.

When the town starts using the system, the Police Department will send out a test message to Oro Valley residents, Larter said.

Using their telephone keypads, residents will be able to decide whether they want to be in the system at all; which devices they want to receive messages on — land-line telephone or cell phone or via e-mail; and the type of information they want to be notified about, he said.

In addition to emergency alerts, residents will be able to choose to receive non-emergency notices about road closures and maintenance, school closures, the times and locations of community meetings and events, scheduled water outages and other news that might interest them, Kovitz said.

The Oro Valley Citizens Corps Council, which recommended the Reverse 911 system to the town, looked at many options for notifying the community about emergency and non-emergency events, said Scott Ingram, the group's chairman.

It considered putting message boards at heavily traveled intersections but felt it would be labor-intensive and require citizens to drive by those intersections.

"Almost everything else we looked at was hit-or-miss," Ingram said. They were a "Band-Aid approach to things."

A vote for Reverse 911

The Citizens Corps Council considered Reverse 911 the best and most cost-effective option overall, he said.

Neither Tucson nor Marana uses a community-notification service similar to Reverse 911.

The Tucson Police Department primarily uses the media and the department's Web site to notify the community, or if time is crucial, officers go door-to-door to alert residents of dangerous situations, said Sgt. Decio Hopffer, a Tucson Police Department spokesman.

Marana is not considering Reverse 911 or a similar system right now because of its cost and other issues, including how the town would maintain the database, said Sheila Blevins, the Marana Police Department's communications manager.

The cost of purchasing and setting up Reverse 911 is based on factors including the population of the service area, the number and type of phone lines installed in the area and optional modules that may be added to the system, according to www.reverse911.com, the Reverse 911 Web site.

Last month, Glendale police used a community-notification system similar to Reverse 911 to find a 10-year-old special-needs student who had run away from her elementary school.

Police sent 30,000 automated messages with a description of the missing student to people living within a two-mile radius, said Matt Barnett, a Glendale Police Department spokesman.

Police found the girl after a woman who had been to the McDonald's where the girl was playing listened to the recorded message that had been left on her answering machine and recognized the missing girl as one of the children on the playground.