The training session, called the Community College Citizen Preparedness Program (3CP2), is free. It consists of two hours of instruction on threat awareness and assessment; sheltering and evacuation; and recovery and resources. This training is open to all residents and their families, businesses, community organizations, civic groups and anyone else interested in becoming better prepared during a disaster.

Given the recent weather events, how many of us prepared a “jump bag” or “go kit” that was at the ready if we needed to evacuate our home? Did we know what to bring with us, and, perhaps equally important, what to leave behind?

This training will teach participants how to identify threats that affect you, your family, and community. Participants will be better prepared to function for 72 hours during a disaster without first responder assistance by being able to access and share appropriate information and training.

This program is made possible through the cooperation of the Essex County College Police Academy.

To register for this free program, please e-mail your name and telephone number to pacademy@essex.edu, or call 973-877-4350.

But in doing so, the test, which was ordered by the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Federal Communications Commission, will miss the communications resources that much of the population uses these days: Web sites, e-mails, social media and cell phones. While Verona has just implemented a reverse 911 system called Nixle that can  send messages to cell and land lines, as well as Twitter, there is no such component to today’s federal test.

This is not to say that we had a communications failure in Verona. The old-fashioned fog horn that calls our volunteer Fire Department and Rescue Squad to action worked spectacularly well, well into the night. But as Board of Education President John Quattrocchi noted at Tuesday’s board meeting, every large emergency has its communications lessons. In the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it was about the vulnerability of  first responder radios and then-nascent cell phone communications. In our snowstorm, it has been that residents were actively using their cell phones to search for and communicate information about trouble and recovery efforts.

Before the storm, the BOE had the only notification system designed to work with cell phones. Called Global Connect, it was a quantum leap over the land-line phone chains that used to get the word out about emergencies. Parents could ask to get messages from the school by e-mail or by voice messages to their land line or cell phones. It has performed admirably in its first year of service, except for one thing: If you didn’t have kids in the public school system–the situation of about 30% of Verona residents–you couldn’t use Global Connect. There was simply no way to enter your information into the system. Global Connect was also somewhat vulnerable. Since it functions off the Internet-based phone system that the school district uses, when the Internet went out at the BOE office in Verona High School, Global Connect went too. Rich Wertz, a math and computer science teacher at VHS who serves as the BOE’s technology coordinator, quickly figured a way to rig the system to his cell phone and get calls and e-mails out (yes, that was Wertz’ voice on the phone).

Some notices also went out through the e-mail service tied to Verona Recreation Department’s online registration system for Rec classes. But Community Pass needed the power to be on at the Community Center to work, and power wasn’t always on in the snowstorm. Verona did not put storm information on the town Web site. (MyVeronaNJ.com got its updates out thanks to an iPad2 and Verizon 3G service in case you are curious.)

Which brings us back to the Verona Police and Nixle. On Tuesday, anyone who had already signed up to get e-mail alerts from the VPD got a message asking them to sign up for Nixle. Sometimes called a reverse 911 system, it can send e-mail messages as well as text, and you can also access your Nixle alerts from the Internet. In fact, you can view the alerts already sent by the VPD through the Verona Police page. It is free to sign up for Nixle, although you will be charged whatever your phone carrier usually charges you for text messages. Nixle doesn’t work with non-U.S. phone numbers, but once you have registered you can get alerts from multiple locations in the U.S., like your kid’s college campus and grandma’s house in Florida.

“New communication forms continue to evolve,” the Police Department said in its e-mail announcing the service, “and we believe this service will allow us to keep you informed in the most convenient, reliable way possible.”

If you haven’t yet signed up for Nixle, you can do so through the Verona Police page. Just don’t pick up your messages while driving: That’s still a violation in Verona.

Fire broke out at a house on Morningside this past May, just as the Memorial Day parade was ending.

For many people in Verona, it is the chief annoyance of living in Verona: The horn. You know the one I mean. Oh sure, it’s quaint the way it blows at 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., to mark the beginning and end of a day (yes, a day of an earlier era).

But confess. At least once in the time you have lived here, especially if you were in the center of town when the horn sounded, you have asked why we still need an air horn to tell the all-volunteer Verona Fire Department and the Rescue Squad that there is an emergency. And, in the case of the Fire Department, to tell them precisely where to respond. But when landlines fail under the weight of snow-covered phone lines and cell phones can be silenced by power outages, it’s nice to know that the horn still works.

“In emergency response, one of the key issues is communication,” says Jeff Hayes, Verona’s director of technology and a volunteer fire fighter. “If people don’t know there is trouble, how can they go help?”

Here’s how they know. Several decades ago, the town mapped out an emergency alert system based on Verona’s grid-like map. Each corner of town was assigned a number. That’s the first number you hear when the horn blows. One blast means the fire is roughly between F.N. Brown school and Bloomfield Avenue. Two puts the fire near Forest Avenue School, three is Brookdale and four is Laning. Five and six are for areas outside the center grid, respectively the north end of Grove Avenue and the streets east of Pompton Avenue, including the Claridge condo buildings and Pilgrim shopping plaza.

The next two numbers tell you the number of intersections east or west from Lakeside Avenue. The final number counts blocks north or south of Bloomfield Avenue. The whole thing is naturally amplified by Verona’s hills and valley topography. So when the horn blew 4-3-3 on Sunday afternoon, Verona’s volunteer firefighters knew to respond to Newman Avenue at the intersection of Hamilton Road, where a downed power line was turning the road surface into molten asphalt.

Verona is not the only town that uses an air horn system to marshal its first responders, and it hasn’t turned its back on newer technology. Every Fire Department and Rescue Squad volunteer is issued a two-way radio, and information is also sent out by text message. This summer, the town installed a second air horn system to alert people at Verona Pool and the Community Center fields that there is a threat of lightning.

And though Verona’s teens might not want to believe it, text messaging is not as fast or efficient as that belligerent horn. There are generally only three or four numbers to blast out with the horn and SMS messaging–as cell texts are called in the communications trade–are at the mercy of the carrier’s other traffic. “Text messages sometimes come five minutes after the horn,” says Hayes.

Normally, the horn isn’t used after 10 p.m. But sleep has been hard to come by for the Fire Department and Rescue Squad since the snow started falling, and the horn has been sounded well into the dark. Hayes, and Verona’s other volunteers, wouldn’t have it any other way.

“I can be mowing the lawn and still hear the horn,” says Hayes. “I can’t say that of a cell phone. And if I ever need help, the horn reassures me that it is on the way.”

Paul Ruderman, in LiveProcess' loft-like headquarters

Verona has a valley that runs through it. But even if you put the words “Verona” and “Valley” together, they probably won’t evoke cutting edge technology in the way that the words “Silicon Valley” do. And yet, at the north end of Grove Avenue, in the valley cut by the Peckman, is a company that is causing folks in tech hot spots to take notice. It’s called LiveProcess and yes, it got its start in a garage.

That was in 2004 in Chatham, N.J. Since then, the company relocated to Verona and the Web-based emergency response system it developed has been implemented by some 500 hospital companies across the country. LiveProcess has grown from two employees to 30–computer engineers, marketing pros and sales reps–20 of whom are based in Verona. (The rest are scattered across the U.S.) And if you grew up in Verona, you probably spent time rooting against John Lubarsky, now the company’s senior VP for sales, because he once was a quarterback for Cedar Grove.

Disasters, not touchdowns are Lubarsky’s focus now because what LiveProcess does is to help hospitals respond to emergencies. In the event of a health crisis, a LiveProcess client can quickly alert everyone whose help is needed and assign them where they need to be. It does so through one system, rather than the fragmented and fractional set-ups most hospitals now use. And it gives them all one central place for managing patients and paperwork.

“We can help hospitals communicate using technology,” says Paul Ruderman, the company’s vice president of operations. “In Katrina,” he adds, referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans, “nobody communicated, particularly the hospitals.”

Victim cards are a key part of an emergency response drill

Hospitals are required by law to run regular emergency drills. Before LiveProcess came along, that was a tedious manual process that involved staging a mock disaster, assigning participants their roles as victims and responders, and compiling reports on how well all performed. Using LiveProcess, a hospital can quickly simulate any kind of emergency, print cards for victims that describe injuries likely to be suffered in that emergency and track how well medical personnel do in handling them.

To Ruderman, the company is on track for much bigger growth down the road. The 500 hospitals that it now counts as clients are just 6% to 10% of all the hospitals in the U.S. “We are looking to add several hundred hospitals over the next few years,” he says. And the growth likely won’t stop there. LiveProcess believes its approach to managing medical data could also be used by other care providers, from nursing homes to outpatient clinics. Next month, it will roll out a system at Saint Barnabus Medical Center designed specifically to help burn centers coordinate their available patient beds.

That kind of growth bodes well for Verona. LiveProcess’ lease (in an old mill building that was home to a cutting edge bronze powder manufacturer a century ago) runs through 2014. The company expects to add to both its sales and engineering staffs this year, and it sources most of the latter locally. “NJIT”, says Ruderman, “is a great source of engineering talent”.