Cache Valley on alert for children
Amber Alerts were designed to help find children who could be in possible danger, and Cache Valley is playing a significant part in helping the program be effective.
Twenty or so businesses in the valley have said they will use their company’s marquees to publicize an alert when it goes out, said Captain Eric Collins of the Logan City Police Department.
“It all depends on the type of sign,” he said.
Collins said business marquees vary in the programming it takes to set the characters and to run them. Some are hooked up to automatically run the information and others have to be programmed manually, which usually holds up the production of the sign for one day.
“The business owner will receive an e-mail and the next morning make up the sign,” Collins said.
There is a whole committee in Salt Lake City that works with the Amber Alert system and they operate within a budget. The possibility of the system expanding in Cache Valley is currently on hold.
“We’ve sent in a funding request to the federal government for about $1 million to update our intelligent transportation system,” said Tom Hudachko, spokesperson for Utah Department of Transportation.
His committee is hoping to place some of the same signs that are on I-15 for traffic conditions in Sardine Canyon. Amber Alerts are run on 62 UDOT signs all over the state of Utah.
“The majority are in the northern part of Utah, mainly the Wasatch front,” Hudachko said.
The marquees’ first purpose is to inform motorists of accidents and construction conditions but when Amber Alert went through, Hudachko said, it became clear that a “traveling motorist can be instrumental in helping to crack a case.”
Logan City police officers are made aware of an Amber Alert after it is sent into the dispatch and then over the mobile units in their vehicles.
“It’s in a matter of minutes,” Collins said.
Twelve businesses, including Lee’s Marketplace, the Comfort Inn and the Utah State University LDS Institute of Religion have offered their signs for use in the case of an Amber Alert if and when needed, said Paul Murphy, Amber Alert coordinator.
“It’s amazing to me how businesses and people have come together to
create the best Amber Alert system in the nation,” he said of the system in Utah.
He also said Cache Valley is one of the better-prepared areas in Utah to issue and be prepared for Amber Alerts.
“Logan’s police chief was the first to invite us up for training,” he said. “And there were law enforcement officers from all over that came to that.”
Amber Alerts have been incredibly successful, Murphy said, and he is proud of the work going on in Utah and especially Cache Valley. He also mentioned that the Attorney General’s Web site has a lot of useful information for the public’s role in helping during Amber Alerts. That Web site is www.attorneygeneral.utah.gov.
-ireneh@cc.usu.edu