Irvine emergency notices work better when your cell is registered

Irvine is planned and orderly in a lot of everyday ways, but emergency messages still need a direct path to the people who should hear them. AlertOC is the mass-notification system Irvine uses for time-sensitive emergency information.

Registering matters because a cell phone or internet-based phone may not be reached the same way an older landline might be. AlertOC can send voice, text, email, and accessible-device messages to contacts you add. That is useful for a home, apartment, business, school commute, older relative, or person who works in Irvine but lives somewhere else.

This is a calm setup task. You do it before there is smoke, a police activity notice, flooding, evacuation message, power issue, or other local emergency. Then you are not trying to set up an account while everyone else is looking for updates.

Use an address you care about, add the phones and emails that should receive messages, and update the account when you move or change numbers. For countywide information, Orange County’s emergency page uses the same AlertOC system.