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West Valley City • The West Valley City Police Department on Tuesday launched a system to alert residents about public-safety situations.

The notification system, called CodeRed, sends texts, emails and voicemails to alert subscribers of missing children, fires, floods and other emergency situations, according to Police Chief Lee Russo.

"We're able to push out information that we feel is important for the community to understand and have awareness [of]," Russo said.

The police department set up an automated call to go out to the 911 network Tuesday afternoon to encourage people to sign up for alerts and download the smartphone app, Russo said. No one will be automatically enrolled in the system, he said.

Emergency Communications Network, CodeRed's parent company in Florida, launched the system in 1998 to give government agencies a quick way to inform residents of emergency situations.

Subscribers can opt in to alerts from not just WVCPD, but other participating police departments, such as North Ogden and Bountiful.

The system collects contact data that residents submit when signing up for the alert, such as a phone number or email address. The app also collects phone carrier information — to ensure the alerts are compatible with all carriers — and phone location, said Teri Friedler, the director of marketing at ECN.

"The app itself is geo-targeted, so we need to know the phone's location in order to be able to send out a relevant alert through the app," she said.

Subscribers only get a notification if their phone is in the physical location that a notification is going out to, Friedler said.

The system, which costs $40,000 for three years, is funded by an annual grant the department receives from the U.S. Department of Justice.

"We still have a significant amount of people in our city on landlines and people who are not on social media. While social media is an excellent tool for us, this is really comprehensive. We can get everyone with this, potentially," said police department spokeswoman Roxeanne Vainuku.

Twitter: @tiffany_mf