Article by William Gregory – System Sales Professional

A town not unlike your own, is full of hard working professionals going about their daily activities. Kids are learning in schools, workers on the assembly floor or office building, and others shopping at the local mall or grocery store. Suddenly, as if out of no where, an impeding tornado is about to touch down and sweep through your quiet town tossing cars like toys, snapping through trees as if they were twigs and knocking buildings over in its devastating path. Everyone needs to be aware, take cover and EVERY SINGLE SECOND COUNTS. How do you get a message like that across to thousands of people all at once to keep them safe? Say hello to Mass Notification Systems.

Mass notification systems provide recipients with vital information and early warnings to allow them to better prepare for an impending disaster.

cited from TechTarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/definition/mass-notification-system

The United States Department of Defense describes Mass Notification in its Unified Facilities Criteria (UFC) 4-021-01 Design & O&M: Mass Notification as “the capability to provide real-time information to all building occupants or personnel in the immediate vicinity of a building during emergency situations. To reduce the risk of mass casualties, there must be a timely means to notify building occupants of threats and what should be done in response to those threats. Pre-recorded and live-voice emergency messages are required by this UFC to provide this capability.”

Many large applications could benefit from mass notification systems. A mass notification system sends messages throughout  an organization to alert the public of an emergency. For large industrial complexes, mass notification systems that are integrated with a fire alarm system can send voice, SMS or push notifications to everyone throughout the facility to let them know of a fire, natural disaster, gas leak, active shooter situations and more. Benefits of these mass notification systems include:

• Streamline Communications
• Allows you to communicate with employees not on site
• Gives real time instructions, reports and assistance
• Emergency power in the event of a loss of power through the fire alarm system
• Can be maintained quarterly, semi-annually, and annually as part of the inspections of the fire alarm system.

With the Notifier Mass Notification system it is integrated directly into the fire alarm system. Allowing for one device that can notify for fire and MNS with different colored lenses for each condition.

The system works very seamlessly with the fire alarm system. Communicating with the monitoring station just as a fire alarm signal would. Because all of the signals are being pushed out to activate the messages are also being initiated by the fire alarm system.

Some of the environments this application would work well: College Campuses, Large Corporations with multiple buildings in a college campus setup. This includes industrial applications such as steel mills or oil refineries where people are spread out over a large area.

How would mass notification work

• An event occurs or someone initiates the system to send out a specific message for a condition such as a First Person Shooter.
• At the same time the system sends a message to the monitoring station notifying them of the same condition.
• The message can be programmed to give very specific information such as Hide, Arm your self or gather at said building.

Need help deciding whether a Mass Notification System is required or how to integrate with your existing systems?

We are happy to help!! (610)277-1331