i like having another professional team in seattle i like soccer i like that soccer kind of brings up a bunch of cultural pieces and ethnic groups all together for the love of the game you can look at the crowd and you  name and what you're doing and happy to my name is barbara graf i'm the director of the city of seattle's office of emergency management were there program within the city that meets together all different city departments police fire transportation and prepares for major emergencies you can work with the community to get prepared this is a new system and we're very excited to roll it out in the community alert seattle is a way that we can share emergency information with the public so if there is some type of danger or something they want to be alerted to the city can can proactively share information about water main breaks or major traffic incidents if there is something dangerous like a  spill in the neighborhood firefighters could push information into the area that it is experiencing that and tell people what they can do to protect their safety yes so this is just only that to do people or people sign up online and it's very very easy we just go to alert dot seattle ok starting on august first and then enter in the information about how should we get ahold of you and your e mail address your phone number and then you also get to choose what would you like to be alerted about maybe you'd like to know about traffic accidents but not whether the water system is off or not maybe i'd like to know about fire department incidents but i don't want to know about traffic so you decide for yourself or you will you want to be alerted about and then choose what methods you'd like to be alerted so maybe you'd like to choose your cell phone and i would like to use my e mail address it's all your own option but your own option also for things that many people don't think of as emergencies so seattle public utilities will occasionally do maintenance on the water system and therefore they might need to turn the water off if you'll sign up for these alerts you can get notification about when that will happen seattle city light has the information on their website about when power is expected to be restored but if you sign up specifically you'll also be notified on the device of your choice your phone or your e mail about that that means back on again i should say also that not everyone has access to a computer to sign up online and so the great service throughout the city of seattle is we encourage people to go to any seattle public library or any of our neighborhood service cent or there is an arsonist who's been setting fires around in a neighborhood the fire department is going to want to notify people through a variety of means and this is just one of them but the nice thing about this service is you're getting to choose are you getting that notification from your local fire department on the cell phone that you carry with you as opposed to maybe the firefighters come to knock on your door and you're not home at that particular time so it's completely your choice as to how you get this so you know reprinting  manner right so i think this is good for our community you know i mean the other message you know what we do and that's just that we need to get as many people to sign up for this is possible because less than one in four people in seattle actually has a hard landline phone that connects them to their wall we're all using these smart cell phone devices now and so we really need people to sign up or they wouldn't get messages from the fired upon and the transportation department the police department etc so once you get yourself signed up it's really really easy to do once you get yourself signed up encourage all your family members your neighbors your church members your your and your business associates to get signed up as well gr had multicultural groups from really from the country of africa coming together to discuss kids i saw returns in the group i saw it the openness of the group us all some somalis in the group we had a man from kenya and one of the things that we were discussing and getting understanding of is that we need to support our kids better we can no longer just send our kids to school we need to take our kids to school other cultures take their kids and we need to make sure we're taking our kids versus in the school one of the main things that i'm seeing with our young people is that they're getting to know the people in school more than they're getting to know parents at home as in parents we feed them and clothe them but our parents have to support the efforts of our young people make sure they get into the right college the right stay the right area make sure the taking the right classes in high school and not just allow school systems to sign our kids up i think this panel discussion is really going to galvanize all of our groups coming together and working together on a common goal which is to be which is to put our differences aside and bring all of our kids together on the same page to make sure that our kids get the best out of life possible and we as adults are going to make sure we do everything we can to be present and accountable and leading our kids to the next level thank you for your time they mean at least west drop off