CodeRED is the notification system used by Marshall County to keep its citizens informed during times of emergency. This is a free service to the citizens of Marshall County and participation is completely voluntary. Participants choose how they would like to receive notifications; by email, text message, or with a prerecorded phone message.

This service can be used to notify participants of area wide occurrences , such as missing persons or evacuation notices. But, not all emergencies or events are widespread. In many cases, sounding the alarm across a broad area when only a specific group needs to be alerted, can do more harm than good. CodeRED uses a combination of software, including mapping software from Google, to provide geo-targeted notifications to ensure that only those that are in the path of danger are notified as quickly as possible.

Using the weather events from April 3rd, 2018 as an example, we can see just how CodeRED determines which citizens to notify when necessary.

The National Weather Service issued the following tornado warning at 7:36 PM:




Figure 1 illustrates the tornado warning area (shaded in red), as predicted by the National Weather Service. Using the map coordinates included in this bulletin, we can see where our area was impacted by the storm.

Even though the warning bulletin only listed Mayfield, Sedalia and Wingo, all of Graves County, the corresponding map does indicate that the warning area expanded just slightly into Marshall County.

CodeRED is able to use this information to determine which participants live in the shaded area, and then send alerts to those citizens. It was discovered there was one participant in this small area, and that citizen was notified of the possible danger of this storm.

At 8:13 PM, the National Weather Service issued another warning, this time for a severe thunderstorm:



We can see in Figure 2 the outline of Marshall County, along with the area of the storm warning, again shaded in red.

Once again, the map was used to determine which participants live in the shaded area. In this instance, CodeRED sent 33 email messages, 117 text messages and 132 prerecorded phone calls to alert our citizens of the impending storm threat.