Letter: How to stay connected during an emergency

To the community,

Thank you to everyone who kept in touch with us via social media Sunday during the extended power outage. Almost 15,000 of you saw our postings on Facebook. During the power outage the police department issued “Reverse 911” calls with updates on the situation. Unfortunately, the calls were not received on land lines which were connected to answering machines because of the power failure and were primarily received on cellular phones.

As a result, the city is asking the public to sign up with their cellular numbers.

To register to receive “Reverse 911” calls to either or both your home landline and your mobile phone line, go online.  It is very easy to sign up and you are allowed to sign up two different phone numbers and two different email addresses along with your physical address.

The El Dorado County Alert Notification System has made it easy to register your chosen contact information through the systems Self Registration Portal. You can then receive notification on your cellular telephone via phone call or text, or at your email address. It’s up to you. To register your emergency contact information or just to find out more information about the system, go online.

Social media via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram proved to be the most effective way to inform the public of Sunday’s emergency situation. You can find the links to the city’s Facebook and Twitter accounts on our home page.  Scroll to the bottom of the page, look on the right side.

Please feel free to share so we can keep even more community members connected during an emergency situation.

Thank you!

Tracy Franklin, public information officer for South Lake Tahoe