In the wake of monumental flooding this week, several members of the Carroll County Board of Commissioners have come out in favor of developing a better means of communicating with residents at a moment’s notice.

The county doesn’t have an alert system in place beyond the sirens located throughout unincorporated Carroll County. Those sirens go off in the event of an emergency but do very little to communicate any specifics about how the public should respond. That needs to change, said Commissioner Ashley Hendrix, and considering the level at which technology has progressed over the last 20 years, there’s no reason why the county can’t blanket the community with necessary information immediately.

Social networking Web sites like Twitter and Facebook already allow users to receive alerts on their phones when “friends” send them messages, and Hendrix said it makes sense for county government to use services like these, among others, to help get information disseminated in the event of a natural disaster or other emergency.

“With technology the way it is nowadays, it’s easy and cost-effective to reach out to a whole lot of people all at once,” Hendrix said. “We just need to make sure we have the features in place so that we can talk to people as soon as we get the information. Our technology is such that we want things as quickly as possible, and it only makes sense to use it for that benefit.”

Following Monday’s flooding, which caused widespread damage to roads and utility systems and at least nine deaths across the region, many county residents were left without clean drinking water, forced to boil water until after the line breaks could be fixed and the Georgia Environmental Protection Division could certify the tap water as fit for human consumption. When the EPD gives the OK, Hendrix said, affected residents should know immediately that they can return to normal water usage, though there is currently no way to get the message out quickly.

Commissioner Trent North, a longtime member of the board, said the implementation of the siren system more than a decade ago was as far as the county has ever gotten in terms of an emergency alert system, and that simply isn’t far enough.

“There’s too much technology out there for the county not to have a mechanism to make citizens aware of what’s going on,” he said. “There needs to be a mechanism out there that does that.”

The city of Carrollton currently has a reverse-911 system that allows city administrators to place a single phone call that can go out to the entire city or to a block or to only a couple of houses. According to City Manager Casey Coleman, the system automatically banks numbers from the phone book into its database, giving the city numbers of all residents who have a land line.

Soon, the county may have something similar, with commission Chairman Bill Chappell announcing this week that the board will hear a presentation at its next meeting regarding a new phone system for the E-911 Department that would effectively serve as a reverse-911 system as well. The Computer Aided Dispatch System, CAD for short, would give the county the ability to contact all those whose numbers are registered in the system and alert them of an emergency as well as giving them instructions about how to proceed.

It’s not known how much the system will cost or how long it will be before it could go online.

The next meeting of the board is on Oct. 6.