Hawthorne Press Tribune
Herald Publications - El Segundo, Hawthorne, Lawndale & Inglewood Community Newspapers Since 1911 - (310) 322-1830 - Vol. 61, No. 8 - February 21, 2019
Inside
This Issue
Calendar of Events.............3
Certified & Licensed
Professionals.......................4
Classifieds............................3
Entertainment......................2
Food.......................................3
Hawthorne Happenings....3
Lawndale..............................4
Legals.................................6,7
Pets........................................5
Weekend
Forecast
Friday
Sunny
58˚/45˚
Saturday
Partly
Cloudy
59˚/47˚
Sunday
Partly
Cloudy
59˚/48˚
The Weekly Newspaper of Hawthorne
Literacy Week at Dana Is a Blast!
This month, Dana Middle School celebrated Literacy Week with festivities including a character dress-up day, bookmark-making and door decorating. Fun times for students and teachers alike. Photo:
Dana Middle School.
Hawthorne City Council Hears
Pitch for Emergency Alert System
By Derrick Deane
Hawthorne may be joining the rest of the
South Bay, as a new unified Emergency Alert
System was proposed to the City Council earlier
this month. Neil Gafney, former chairman of
the Veteran Affairs Commission, spoke to the
Council about a new program from Everbridge
that would unite cities in the South Bay in
the event of an emergency or disaster. “It’s
something that is well-needed,” Gafney said
during his presentation. “We have a chance to
put the South Bay on the map in the context
of emergency notification.”
Gaffney continued, “We are very disasterprone
in California. We have been very
fortunate in Hawthorne. We don’t have the
risk of fires and floods, but we are at risk from
other activities and we have been dodging the
bullet for a while. At some point, the price is
going to come and when it does, this is a way
we can tell the community. We’re vulnerable
because we really don’t have an alert system
in place.”
Gafney cited that currently people use Facebook
or NextDoor, but added that one of the
biggest issues with those is that “you’ve got
to be enrolled with an account and you have
to be looking for the notifications.”
The California State Legislature has also
passed bills back in September 2018 regarding
emergency alert systems. One of those bills,
SB 833, requires that cities have an emergency
alert and process defined by July 1. Meanwhile,
SB 821 authorizes cities to enroll residents
into an emergency alert system by collecting
phone numbers and email addresses from utility
bills. Residents will have the ability to opt out.
“The significance of 821 is that is turns
the dynamic from people having to come to
us to say we want to be notified to us being
able to bring them into a notification system
automatically,” Gafney said.
Gafney added that if a resident chooses to
opt-in further, “we are able to glean more
information if they are able to provide it. It
would be nice to know if someone was living
on oxygen if there is a power outage or they
can’t be evacuated without a wheelchair.”
Additionally, Assembly Bill 1646 mandates
the development of an integrated alert/notification
system for the public and surrounding
communities of petroleum refinery-related
events. Hawthorne is bordered to the west
by El Segundo’s Chevron refinery and is in
close proximity to Torrance’s massive refinery
formerly owned by Exxon-Mobil, which was
the site of a large explosion in 2015.
“We have mandates from the state that says,
by law, we have to do something,” Gafney said.
“Right now in L.A. there’s a lot of disjointed
systems – there’s Code Red, there’s ALERT
LA. None of these things are effective. They
don’t communicate with each other and they
don’t communicate inter-agency-wise, so
police departments have their own systems,
fire departments have their own, so that lack
of communication doesn’t bode well in a
disaster situation.”
Gafney added that typically information
sharing doesn’t happen among municipalities.
“If something happens in Inglewood, we may
not know about it. If something happens at a
refinery in Torrance, we may not know about
it,” he said. “Disasters do not respect governmental
boundaries.”
Gafney’s solution to the disjointed emergency
and disaster alert systems currently in place is
Everbridge’s Multi-Jurisdictional Notification
System (MJNS). “Everbridge is generally
considered the premiere application provider
for crisis communications,” he said. “It’s a
customized platform for all the South Bay cities
which is going to allow the cities to meet
legislative requirements and eliminates various
systems that are not exchanging information.”
Additionally, Everbridge’s MJNS will have a
“force multiplier” benefit so that, according to Gafney,
“If there is a terrorist attack at the Inglewood
Stadium in a year or two, they may not be
able to have their emergency alert management
people put out an alert. They would rely on
us because we would have that capability.”
The jurisdictions that the Everbridge MJNS
would comprise encompasses 14 cities in what
is known as Area G and runs from Inglewood
down to Torrance and includes the Beach
Cities along with Hawthorne. In the event of
an emergency or disaster situation, residents
would get a notification -- first on their mobile
phone, then email, and lastly through land
line, if available. Additionally, further opt-in
from residents allows the ability to extend
notifications beyond disasters such as school
notifications, traffic accidents and more.
“In your text message, it will say whatever
message template we create – shelter in place,
don’t go outside – whatever it is [then], ‘Please
type Y or Yes,’ indicating that you received
that message,” Gafney said. “That’s a really
critical feature because sometimes messages
go out and people won’t acknowledge or they
don’t get it and you don’t know how many
you’ve [reached].”
Gafney added, “If we don’t get a response
after a certain time frame – 30 seconds or a
minute, it then goes to the next contact point,
could be an email address or a land line.
The point is that the message is going to go
out, people are going to have the chance to
say they got the message and we’ve alerted
a tremendous amount of the community we
wouldn’t have otherwise.”
Severe weather alerts would be linked with
the National Weather Service (NWS) and all
notifications will be auto-translated into multiple
languages.
Gafney says as of now, 13 of the 14 South
Bay cities have signed up with Lawndale being
the lone exclusion. Cost for enrollment in the
program is based on the size of the population
served. For Hawthorne, the cost would be
$31,000 annualized on a three-year contract.
The City Council will be required to vote
on a resolution to allow the procurement of
public utility database records at an upcoming
meeting. Once the database is populated and
message templates are defined, the program
would go live. •