PARIS — If a tornado like the two in recent years hits Oxford County, officials will be able to warn everyone near the twister and its projected path.

The Oxford County Emergency Management Agency expects to have its Mass Notification System up and running by late March. The system, like other improvements coming to the EMA, was paid for by a federal grant from the Department of Homeland Security.

The system uses the Emergency-911 database of phone numbers, including the location data used by responders to answer 911 calls, to make mass phone calls notifying residents of disasters.

If there’s a train crash, for example, Oxford County can notify everyone within a 10-mile radius, said EMA director Scott Parker.

He said the system can even send out phone calls for school snow days, with a list of households that have children going to certain schools. “You can have a pre-scripted list for snow days so you already know every kid you’ve got to call,” he said.

“We’ve had accidents that have stacked up traffic for hours on Route 26,” Parker said. The new system can warn residents to avoid a certain road.

Long-distance calls across the county will cost about 10 cents, Parker said. “If you have 100 people in your town, for $10 you can tell them, ‘The tornado is 30 minutes out, it’s time to buckle things down, get into your basement.'”

Parker said the two recent tornadoes convinced him to pursue the mass notification system. “The weather pattern in Oxford County has changed in the past five years,” he said.

The Homeland Security grant pays for the phone lines for three years. After that, he said, he’ll have to find funding to continue it.

The EMA also has a new system that allows it to send text messages to firefighters and other responders who are out of radio range but have cell phones, Parker said. The system, called PageGate, costs less than giving pagers to every volunteer firefighter.

“We’re going to roll that out next month,” Parker said.

Through another grant, the county was able to buy new narrow-band radios for responders across the county. A federal grant has paid for about $25,000 in new radio equipment, which has been dispensed to local departments on a need basis.

The PageGate and Mass Notification systems will be up and running by the end of March, Parker said.

[email protected]