Last updated April 12, 2019
Residents in Clark County are being urged to add the telephone numbers of their new and old cell phones to the Wide Area Rapid Notification (WARN) Emergency Notification System in the wake of the system’s failure to be able to contact 30 per cent of telephone numbers on Monday. Clark County Sheriff Gene Kelly says that residents are at risk of not being notified in the event of a major disaster because so many people have abandoned their traditional landline telephones in favor of cell phones – the numbers of which are not listed on the Notification System because only landline numbers are automatically added to it at the present time.
“We continually urge people to sign up their numbers, not unlike our urge for people to have a 72 hour kit,” says the deputy director of the Clark County Emergency Management Association, Ken Johnson.
According to statistics that were published in a report from the Centers for Disease Control, just over a quarter of the population of Clark County have now gone wireless as of June last year, compared to under 15 per cent three years earlier in 2007. Barely nine per cent of people in the county have landline only, with another 25 per cent of the population having a combination of both landline and wireless services. More than 10,000 numbers that were called by the Notification System did not respond.