ESDA Blog
Zion Emergency Services

As of Today, our Weather updates will now be from @zionweather

Also, when an ALL-CALL page is sent from the cur­rent pag­ing sys­tem or a BLOG update is made, noti­fi­ca­tions will be made to @zesda

Zion Emer­gency Ser­vices has a Twit­ter account of zesda and has been post­ing weather updates to it every 10 min­utes for sev­eral months…  In fact there are cur­rently 108 fol­low­ers of the weather data.

Begin­ning March 1^st, the weather reports will be sent using zion­weather instead.  This will allow us to start post­ing on the orginal account for unit updates and spe­cial announcements.

Also, start­ing some­time in March, we will start auto-posting any ALL-CALLs that are sent through the cur­rent pag­ing sys­tem to the orig­i­nal zesda Twit­ter account.

As of Jan­u­ary 11, 2010 all new out­bound pages from ESDA, until we get set up for eDis­patches page­outs, will come from the num­ber 224–789-THAN (8426).

If you respond via text mes­sag­ing to it at this cur­rent time, you will NOT receive a reply.  We will be adding new func­tion­al­ity to that in the future.  If you respond to it by call­ing, it will CALL the ESDA cen­ter.  If no-one answers, you will be taken to a voice­mail account that the Admin & Tech­nol­ogy depart­ments can retrieve.

Lots of changes com­ing for ESDA in 2010.  We wish to keep all mem­bers informed elec­tron­i­cally.  If you’re a mem­ber and have not received your ESDA email account yet, please let Jeff CD11 know.

Have a cell phone or pager?  You an ESDA mem­ber?  Want to know when we have a call-out?  Please con­tact CD02, CD09, CD10 or CD11 with your phone # and car­rier, we’ll add you to the “pag­ing” list.

Need con­tact infor­ma­tion for any of the above men­tioned CD #‘s?  Sign into the Mem­ber site at http://​mem​bers​.zionesda​.org with your pro­vided login info.  Don’t have your login info?  Send an email to technology@​zionesda.​org and we will respond with the required information.

All ESDA mem­bers who have pagers will need to turn them in by the end of the month.  The city has decided to can­cel our con­tract with USA Mobil­ity and we will be shut­ting them all off by Novem­ber 30, 2009.

If you cur­rently have a cell phone and can receive text mes­sages, please con­tact CD11 (Jeff Par­rish) with your cell # and carrier.

We are also look­ing into other meth­ods of con­tact­ing our mem­bers by using a sys­tem that will call your cell/home phone with a voice copy of the page.  This is just an idea at this time, but we will at least wish to have text mes­sage capabilities.

Also, EMAIL is avail­able to all mem­bers.  Please con­tact CD11 (Jeff Par­rish) to receive your email address today.

You can con­tact Jeff @ JeffP @ ZionESDA​.org

All ESDA mem­bers will be reciev­ing an email account @zionesda.org.

The rea­son for this is that we want to be able to com­mu­ni­cate will all the mem­bers.  We will be start­ing e-newsletters and also send a copy of all ALL-CALL pages to you so you know what was missed.

Please con­tact Jeff with the Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment to get your login/password for your email by send­ing an email to:  jeffp@​zionesda.​org

After lots of work and test­ing, we will be chang­ing our method of pag­ing our members…

Why?  Since we do Call-A-Rounds for our activ­i­ties for assis­tance from our mem­bers, we needed a way for our mem­bers to leave us voice­mail if the lines are busy or no-one is at the center.

All our mem­bers will be reciv­ing 2 pages when this change occurs.  The first one will be announc­ing the end of the old sys­tem, and the sec­ond one will be so you can save the num­ber in your phones con­tact list for being able to call back at any time.

This new num­ber, which will not be listed here, is set up to call the ESDA Cen­ter when you call it, if no-one answeres the phone, you will have the option to leave a voicemail.

With all the changes that are occur­ing within Zion Emer­gency Ser­vices, the Tech­nol­ogy depart­ment has decided to rename the blog.  It is no longer the Director’s Blog, but now the ESDA Blog.

What this now means is that our Depart­ment Heads will now have the abil­ity to add entries for their depart­ment and let every­one know what is going on within their department.