Los Angeles County Selects TFCC As ENS Provider

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 19, 2009

Columbus, Ohio: Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. (TFCC), the leading provider of emergency notification solutions and other on-demand alerting and call answering services, today announced that Los Angeles County has selected TFCC as provider of emergency notification to county residents and businesses.  The county has named the system Alert LA County. 

TFCC has the capability to send multi-modal communications – emergency voice, text, and email messages – using a combination of telephone database and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. Unique to TFCC, it also has the ability to detect and communicate with Telecommunication Devices for the Deaf (TTY/TDD). TFCC is the only emergency notification provider to offer true TTY communications for the hearing impaired (patent pending).

TFCC’s system will be used to communicate time-sensitive and critical messages containing warnings about wildfires, floods and other disasters that affect neighborhoods in Los Angeles County.

The county selected Ohio-based TFCC, which has implemented similar emergency notification systems for San Diego, Riverside, Monterey and Del Norte counties, as well as numerous organizations across the U.S., including the American Red Cross and the Washington, D.C. Emergency management Agency.

Los Angeles County is the most populous county in the United States, with an estimated population of 10.3 million people. Twenty First Century has the network redundancy and telecom platform to handle high volumes of call traffic. TFCC already processes calls for 80 of the largest U.S. utilities, representing 85 million unique phone numbers nationwide.

TFCC is the system that powers AlertSanDiego, the mass notification system which helped San Diego County safely evacuate over 500,000 people during the 2007 Southern California wildfires.

The County Board of Supervisors voted to spend about $2 million on the system, which officials say should be in place by June. This cost also includes the purchase of the 9-1-1 data from the local telephone companies. Henry Balta, Senior Associate CIO for Los Angeles County said that Twenty First Century Communications won the contract through a competitive bidding process open to vendors across the United States.

Balta said that TFCC’s emergency notification system will be used to send messages to residents affected by a particular incident. “Typically, emergencies are regionalized,” he said. “We will use Alert LA County to reach out to residents and businesses in affected areas.”

To do so, county officials will identify an affected area using TFCC’s advanced online GIS-mapping system, which automatically generates a list of contacts within the designated area. An appropriate message then goes out over multiple channels such as landlines, cell phones, email, text-message and TTY.

The system is capable of multi-modal communications, however initially it will contact listed and unlisted landline phones using data from phone companies’ 9-1-1 directories. The county also will provide a Web page where residents can sign up to get messages on other devices like their cellular and VoIP phone, email and text.

“Los Angeles County joins a growing list of public safety and government agencies that rely on TFCC for rapid, reliable crisis communications every day,” said James Kennedy, CEO of Twenty First Century Communications, Inc. “TFCC was battle-tested during the 2007 wildfires and hundreds of other times over the past twenty years. We are proud to welcome Los Angeles County to our client community and look forward to helping keep its citizens safe and informed for years to come.”

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