The Yakima Valley office of Emergency Management is looking to institute a county wide alert system.

The system would notify each household with a phone line of a current or future emergency. People would also be able to sign up for alerts on their cell phones, pagers or email.

Yakima's emergency management director Jim Hall says Yakima County is one of the state's only largely populated counties that does not have an alert system in place. He says, "Without a system rumors can start and are tough to reel in unless you can get out the correct information, so yes we need a system"

Hall says the notification system could cost up to $40,000. Emergency Management is still talking to vendors and said they need to do more research on pricing and how they would pay for the system.

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