BENTON COUNTY — County officials called last Friday’s test of the Benton County alert system a qualified success, based on their preliminary review of the drill.

Josh Billis, the county’s emergency communications director, said he’ll review the data for several days. He said his early assessment of the test was a “huge success.”

The alert system is designed to deliver warning messages to county residents in the event of a tornado and can also be tailored by users to deliver a variety of other messages.

The system was activated for the Dec. 31tornado that hit the Cincinnati community in Washington County, but no telephone messages were sent. The system sent e-mail, text messages and voice mail to registered electronic devices.

A representative of Cooper Notification, the company that provides the service, said the feature activating a message to all land lines in the county was turned off.

County officials and Cooper representatives differed over why the system was configured to prevent land-line calls, but the company changed the setting and agreed to conduct a test of the system, which was done last Friday.

Matt Garrity, the county’s manager of emergency services, said about 97,000 calls went out when the system was activated at 1 p.m. Friday. He said the county quickly discovered an unforeseen problem when hundreds of people began calling back.

“We were swamped with phone calls,” Garrity said, noting some people who missed the initial call saw a missed call indicator and called the county number.

“We’ve got to figure out some way to get the message out to not have them call us back,” Garrity said. “If we’d had that many calls in a real emergency, we wouldn’t have been able to do our jobs.”

News, Pages 6 on 01/12/2011