Intrado delivers safety solution for missing children

It doesn’t do much good to hear about a child-abduction in your neighborhood on the evening news. By then, 74% of abducted children are already dead. The National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) has teamed with Denver-based public safety solutions provider Intrado to implement an emergency notification system that informs local or targeted communities by phone immediately about a missing child.

Intrado’s IntelliCast Target Notification system broadcasts voice messages simultaneously to either a predefined or modifiable set of telephone numbers, which can include information such as the date and time of an incident, physical descriptions, locations, instructions and a number to call for tips. The system is administered by local public safety officials either over the phone or through a secure Web site.

“This is another tool in the toolbox of public safety,” said Stephen Meer, co-founder, vice president and chief technology officer at Intrado. “It is one more way that a community can be notified very specifically about something that their public safety officials are asking for their help with.”

IntelliCast can be used with the America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response (AMBER), which has already helped save the lives of abducted children through its radio and television alerts. However, the system is available to all communities, with or without AMBER. Police in Pocatello, Idaho recently used IntelliCast to help locate a missing child within 15 minutes of notification.

While IntelliCast can be used in conjunction with AMBER, which uses many information outlets simultaneously such as radio, television and road signs, it also has its advantages as a local system. “The dynamics of lost kids are such that you may want to start out just a pitch smaller than that,” Meer said. “Using IntelliCast and the geographic awareness of the telephone number, we can target a message to a smaller area.”

Targeting specific areas has made IntelliCast useful in other areas of public safety as well. During the forest fires this year in Colorado, IntelliCast was used in conjunction with television news broadcasts. The TV news tactic known as the crawl, a scrolling text banner of breaking news, informed people that they would be notified by phone automatically if their area needed to be evacuated.

One of the features of IntelliCast, which makes it both easy and efficient to use and accounts in part for relatively short 30-to-45 day implementation cycle, is the Web and phone interface that eliminates the need to define preset calling areas. It allows users to specify an address and draw a radius or any shape around it by using a mouse on an electronic map and notify only those within that area.

“You never know where a child is going to disappear, so now you don’t have to pre-guess and set up a lot of different scenarios,” Meer said.