The Irvine Police Department debuted the so-called Hi/Lo siren with a new catchphrase and will use it to let natives know about an emergency. Irvine PD posted a video on its Twitter page demonstrating the siren system. Department vehicles will play a pre-recorded message for people who speak multiple languages that will dictate one of these evacuation order types.
- Shelter-in-Place (SIP)
- Evacuation Warning
- Immediate Evacuation
- Repopulation
The device is now part of Irvine City’s campaign on public safety that gives natives emergency evacuation route updates, including updates on regions outside wildfire threats. Hi/Lo does not substitute Wireless Emergency Alerts (WEA) or AlertOC but rather works together with the two notification systems.
The so-called ‘Silverado Fire’ event necessitated the evacuation of above 90,000 individuals from Irvine. Office of Emergency Services Manager Robert Simmons stated that there are over a hundred evacuation zones in the city.
Simmons stated that earlier wildfires had underlined the requirement for evacuation instructions in visual and text forms, so interoperability between the online map and public alerting was important. The zones were utilized in the real-time, web-based evacuation map as the aforesaid wildfire emerged to evacuate in excess of 90,000 natives as well as inform people of accessible paths and evacuation center locations.
After the wildfire, Irvine determined that improvements should be made to evacuate residents safely and efficiently in an emergency. Irvine defined the improvements as the requirement to do the following.
- Create and develop pre established evacuation areas for the rest of Irvine
- Identify more ways of communicating evacuation order-related information to people who do not speak English.
Simmons stated that there are 116 new evacuation zones in Irvine’s latest evacuation map. He also said that in an emergency, Irvine PD would broadcast its new siren and would play a multilingual safety message to let natives know about the importance of evacuating.