How To Receive Warnings When An Emergency Event Might Impact Your Neighborhood, School Or Workplace

With more than 8.5 million people living in New York City, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that emergency situations like subway delays, power outages, and inclement weather can have a huge impact on our day-to-day lives.

At SelectCare, we believe a well-prepared, well-informed community is a safe community, and that is why we make great efforts to prepare for emergency situations and ensure our clients and staff has the information they need to remain safe.

To that end, we want to remind everyone about a great, free tool they can use to receive warnings when an emergency event might impact their neighborhood, school, or workplace: Notify NYC.

How It Works

Notify NYC was launched in 2007 and became a citywide service in 2009.  The service is run by New York City Emergency Management, whose staff monitors FDNY, NYPD, 911, and other emergency services for emergencies events that might impact local residents.

If an emergency occurs, Notify NYC subscribers receive messages via email, text, recorded phone messages, Twitter, or RSS feeds.  The notification method is chosen by the user when they subscribe, as well as the types of emergencies they would like to receive notifications for.

Notify NYC alerts residents to the following types of emergencies:

• Major Mass Transit Disruptions – messages about large or widespread mass transportation disruptions.
• Emergency Alerts – messages about life-threatening events that may require immediate action. All registrants are automatically added to this list.
• Significant Event Notifications – important information about emergency events, utility outages and other types of high-impact events in your area code.
• Public Health Notifications – information about important public health issues in your community.
• Public School Closing/Delay Advisories – updates about unscheduled public school closings, delays, and early dismissals.
• Unscheduled Parking Rules Suspensions – updates about unscheduled suspensions of citywide parking rules.
• Major Traffic Disruptions – messages about significant roadway closures, disruptions, or detours.
• Waterbody Advisories – messages about combined sewer overflow (CSO) activity in New York City’s waterbodies.
• Beach Notifications – information from the NYC Department of Health and NYC Department of Parks and Recreation regarding the status of NYC beaches.

How To Subscribe to Notify NYC

Subscribing to Notify NYC takes all of about three minutes. Simply visit the Notify NYC website, click “enroll,” enter a working email address, create a password, indicate the types of alerts you wish to receive, and provide a street address to near your home, workplace, or other location for local updates. Once completed, you will receive an email including a link you must click to activate your account.  Unenrolling is equally easy and performed through the same Notify NYC website. 

What About Late Night Alerts?

In the past several years, emergency alerts sent via smartphone have caught serious backlash when sent in the early hours of the morning.  It should be noted that these alerts are NOT from Notify NYC. Instead, these are being sent by various local, state, and federal organizations through the federal Wireless Emergency Alert system, which automatically sends emergency alerts – complete with an extremely loud alarm – to all wireless devices within range of cell phone towers in emergency-affected areas. There is currently no way to avoid receiving these messages, however this system is rarely used.

On behalf of SelectCare’s staff, we urge everyone to consider signing up for Notify NYC in order to ensure our community is well-informed and prepared.  To learn more about SelectCare and our other emergency preparedness programs, give us a call to speak with one of our home health care experts!