Nixle

Want to get announcements from the City of Davis to your email and/or phone during an emergency? Or hear about other important city-related information, such as road closures? Coming sometime soon, you can. Starting in January 2010, the City began promoting a citizen self-registering email and text messaging notification tool from Nixle.com. One of the unique features of this new tool is that subscribers will be able to specify multiple locations, such as a home address, a business address and a child’s school address. The city can then tailor messages to certain areas of town, if necessary. See City press release for details.

Despite the city promoting it and encouraging people to register, there are problems with registering on Nixle, demonstrating the cities lack of proper planning (or else plain bad luck). It doesn't seem to be operational or useful for Davis, and it's unclear on how to currently sign up, or whether it's even working at all yet if you do.

A number of other local agencies use the California Health Alert Network.

See also Emergency Services and Emergency Radio.

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Comments:

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2010-02-28 16:00:52   So far, I am not impressed with this, since it's not clear how you're supposed to sign up. "Davis, CA" or "95616" don't seem to be registered with them. I could just give them my personal information and hope for the best, I suppose. Not likely. Maybe we're not fully set up with them yet. —CovertProfessor

2010-02-28 21:29:23   Why are we listing a service that doesn't seem to actually support Davis yet? Let alone a service that when you put in 95616 it only lists 4 supported regions right now? I'd suggest we preface this with "not yet working" banner or something. —WesHardaker

• My thought was that the City of Davis seems to be trying to get Davisites to adopt it, so I thought I'd try to help things along by creating the page — especially since information during past emergencies has been extremely hard to come by. The City is linking to it now and seems committed to using it. I don't know why it isn't working yet — I'm not even sure that it isn't working yet. Perhaps all you need to do is sign up as an individual, and it will send messages by zip code. I'm just not sure. —CovertProfessor
  

• 2010-03-01 06:58:51   Um... but the fact that when you do step 1 and it doesn't appear to support Davis seems to be both confusing and more likely not working yet. The text above says it's been adopted by the city and you should sign up, but I'm not at all convienced we should be making that recommendation on this page until it actually works. —WesHardaker
  

• Yeah, I agree. Nice page writeup, but I think it's from a few months in the future, because it doesn't describe the current situation. Hopefully they'll fix it up soon and we can revert to this version. -ES
  

• Then why is the City asking people to sign up now? —CovertProfessor
  

• Well, the press release said that they "will begin using" without giving any definite date. IMO, this is horrible planning: they shouldn't promote signing up for something that isn't set up yet, as it'll just be discouraging and probably turn people away that would have used it. -ES
  

2010-03-01 10:19:04   Davis is supported, but you have to let their autosuggest get it for you. Type in "Davis", but pick "Davis, California" from the list. —JasonAller