The Kenai Peninsula Borough is rolling out a new emergency notification system months after a spotty tsunami response highlighted flaws in the borough’s 20-year-old disaster alert process.

KPB Alerts, unveiled April 30, features a number of new tools, including the ability to make geographic-specific notifications, send texts and quickly send out automatic alerts to landlines, cell phones and social media platforms.

“This system is designed to push alerts out as many ways as possible automatically,” said Dan Nelson, Kenai Peninsula Borough Office of Emergency Management Program Manager.

Nelson said updating the alert system has been on emergency management’s agenda for a while, but had been on the back burner until the January tsunami.

“This went to the first priority right after that event,” Nelson said. “We saw that (Rapid Notify) was simply not working.”

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